http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3624652/The-30-best-...

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the USA won the medal of gold. The Greeks said you're better than the Cassius of old.' - He said this quote after he won the Olympic light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Games in Rome

Pretty amazing for an 18 year old .. if a bit Trump-like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Heat_ray

Putting his heritage to good use it seems :)

Our 19th Century rube would fail to recognize cars/trucks, airplanes, helicopters, and rockets; radio, and television (the telephone was 1875, so just missed this one); toasters, blenders, and electric ranges. Also unknown to the world of 1885 are inventions like radar, nuclear fission, and atomic bombs. The list could go on. Daily life would have undergone so many changes that the old timer would be pretty bewildered, I imagine. It would appear as if the world had blossomed with magic: voices from afar; miniature people dancing in a little picture box; zooming along wide, hard, flat roads at unimaginable speeds—much faster than when uncle Billy’s horse got into the cayenne pepper. The list of “magic” devices would seem to be innumerable.

Similarly the perspective of the average 21st century "rube" (though likely to be better educated than his 19th century counterpart) has little understanding of computing or networking, or genome sequencing etc.

Growing up in the 90s reading Bruce Coville's "my teacher is an alien" series, I remember being awed by the description of a "universal translator" device gifted by aliens to the main character. Yet within 20 years, everyone I know has a much more capable version of that device in their pocket.

The author obviously has a right to his opinions, but it's clear that this article is just that: an opinion piece. Since he's a physicist, his perspective might be somewhat muddled by the place of science in technological progress:

Science > Engineering > Market Adoption

Today's scientists are discovering things that tomorrow's engineers will turn into technologies that day after tomorrow's entrepreneurs will consumerize. It's worked this way throughout history, and yes, it's faster now than ever before.

Humans also tend to react much more strongly to the malicious actions of others than to the arbitrariness of nature (including human error, as humans are part of nature). Even compared to your ordinary murder, terrorism takes it to the next level, since it indicates that there are others who share the ideology or membership in the terrorist group who intend to cause harm to your society, and they're still out there.

In short, it's not all about "risk". It's about justice. There's little irrational about the desire to live in a just world, and the willingness to pay for it.

I would worry that trying to solve the whole issue at once, like the professor seems to suggest, would be a non-starter politically.

But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.

"The reason it’s important to get it right is that if we’re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly—and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won’t solve the problem. So if you think it’s the war on drugs, you might think, ‘OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.’ And, you know, it’s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.

And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either."

This is a weird argument, because reducing the prison population by 17% is a significant dent ..

When you have a truly complex problem, the way to solve it is to pick it apart into simpler parts. If we start with ending the war on drugs, and the prison pop only goes down 17%, we can move on to the next reform.

Great, that means if we end the drug war, we'd get 20% reduction in our world-record incarcerated population. A half-million more people (roughly) will be freed to get treatment and attempt to contribute to the economy and society.

That sounds like a great start to me.

His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain security, to advocate reasonable limits on the rate of immigration so as to not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the better off.

Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote.

If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes below [2].

There is such a thing as Americanness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.

When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."

Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power.

[1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-Refo...

[2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html

I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.

Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.

I think the easiest first step is to spend more on teachers within the current budgets.

It may not be that expensive, if class sizes are not that important you can have fewer teachers. The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.