brlittle

most of the annoying 14-year-olds wouldn't be our friends

That's definitely the case here. :)

When I can walk out the back door and speak directly to the head of the department in charge of our application programming team, or the guys running the servers, and so on, then I feel pretty good about guaranteed uptime. More importantly, I can blame someone when it fails.

Let's presume for a minute that my smallish enterprise was to move to Google Apps, and for some reason completely beyond the control of my people (Google failure, cable cut, whatever), the service goes out. Who do I blame?

You can call it "shit" if that makes you feel better about it. But it certainly doesn't cut any ice for me to walk into the President's office and say "But Google only had 10 seconds of outage in 2003-2004." I'm still fired. Imagine how much worse it would be for someone in a large installation.

When I control the gear, I control what I can and can't accomplish. Unless you can sell me on a serious guarantee of service and compelling functionality...no thanks.

Is this a trick question?

<grin>

Actually, I sympathize.

But I want one because the quality of Blu-ray (or whatever hi-def format) simply beats the snot out of anything I can get via download. So perhaps that's a subjective thing. I'm not ready to kick my physical media to the curb at this time, though I do wish I could rip the hi-def formats.

Let me know when you find that deal on 32GB flash drives...I'll be right in line behind you for 2 or 3!

I maintain that it doesn't support your argument that our economy is being dragged down. You may argue that it's not growing at the rate you think it would, and I can respond by arguing that the resulting society isn't one I'd want to live in -- that's a different discussion. But the general trend of growth year over in real GDP (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/Data/HistoricalR...) is not evidence of being "dragged down." The trend is broadly up.

Regarding your second point, this is a canard. The fact that the 10 largest, most successful economies in the world (in fact, most if not all of the top 20) incorporate elements of socialism (most to a much greater degree than the US) demonstrates that mixed economies can, and do, succeed. Your initial argument at least implies that a mixed economy is not a successful one. If I read that incorrectly, please tell me, because by most metrics, mixed economies are not only surviving, but prospering.

According to both the IMF and the World Bank, the world's 10 largest economies in 2006 were, in order, the EU, the US, Japan, Germany, the PRC, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain and Brazil. Very mixed economies, every one. I really don't see how this supports the idea that they're being "dragged down."

As I noted in my other comment, I think you can question the teachers' methods, certainly.

It would be appropriate at this point to zoom out a bit and remind everyone that we're talking about a playroom full of kids ranging from roughly kindergarten to third grade. Of course eliminating inequality (insofar as access to toys and play equipment is concered) is the point! As I stated in a previous comment, you can argue whether the teachers picked the best way to do it, but that argument does not change the underlying premise.

I think one can argue whether or not the teachers are doing that in an effective and appropriate way, certainly. But I believe that this one underlying fact is nonnegotiable.

Personally, and as a parent, I find the repeated and forceful attempts to turn this into some kind of capitalist vs. socialist laboratory are both ill-conceived and ill-advised. Whatever else may be true of the situation, I believe it is certainly no place to institute a Lego-fied re-enactment of Lord of the Flies.

That is emphatically not what happened. What the kids discovered was that the fastest and most aggressive kids (i.e. the ones who got to the bins first) got the most desirable bricks/pieces. The spin you (and to be fair, most of us, me included) are putting on it implies that children are miniature adults, which isn't the case.

The role of the teachers (and recall that this is an after-school program) was to create a place where all children had the opportunity to play and enjoy themselves...not to allow the creation of an environment where some kids were specifically excluded. Yes, they proposed a framework -- one entirely appropriate to the setting. But in the end, most of the rules were created by the kids themselves.

The end result was a more satisfying experience for _everyone_, not just the fastest, biggest or smartest. In short, everybody does better when everybody does better.

"We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity."

I'm hard-pressed to see how people find fault with this. Who doesn't want their children to learn how to negotiate decisions and collaborate with others?

"There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing."

But at the end of the day, everyone _didn't_ get the same thing. The only thing everyone got was a chance to be a part of the play. Where they went with that was up to them.

"I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces."

Except you wouldn't have had to. By getting all the "cool pieces (windows and such) you would have set yourself in possession of what everyone wanted. Plain building bricks were not valued, simply because there were so many of them. You wouldn't have needed to barter except in a very limited way. In short, you'd be the one with all the marbles. That's not appropriate to the setting, regardless of what spin adults might put on it.

This isn't always, or even usually, true. Millions upon millions are born into this world with _no_ prospects, and _no_ opportunity, and _no_ amount of hard work, inspiration or pure luck will change that. It may be more true in America than elsewhere, but it's certainly not the rule.

And the "free market" is a recipe for monopoly and domination as much as for opportunity. The goal of the players in a free market is the elimination of opportunity for anyone but themselves. The free market does not reward altruism, so there's no incentive not to crush anyone in your way, other than personal decency. Which also doesn't pay. The market we enjoy here is anything but free, for which I'm thankful.

"If everyone and everything is the same, then why even bother doing anything better or trying?"

That's a strawman.

"Socialism scares me to no end because it is way easier to scream for support and get it than it is to actually make something out of yourself."

Out of curiosity, what's your actual experience of socialism?

"I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to have to live in a world that is built for the LCD."

So raise the lowest common denominator. There are multiple paths to that goal, after all.

I'm confused. Are you arguing that resources in the "real world" are not finite? So we'll never run out of indium, oil, fresh water, fertile soil, etc? Because if you are, that's a fascinating viewpoint, and almost completely at odds with reality.

"Surely all the wealth creation done by startups is evidence of that."

Maybe, maybe not. A lot of the "wealth" created by startups exists nowhere but on paper.

It might have been "peaceful" in that setting, but take the teachers out of the equation for an hour or so, and see how peaceful it is when the marginalized kids realize they can force their way into the game by pushing the hoarders around, or simply smash the buildings so _no one_ gets to play.

You think it wouldn't happen?