aphar

http://www.businessinsider.com/50-suggested-budget-cuts-for-the-us-government-2010-6
Washington spends $25 billion annually maintaining unused or vacant federal properties
Because of overstaffing, the U.S. Postal Service selects 1,125 employees per day to sit in empty rooms. They are not allowed to work, read, play cards, watch television, or do anything. This costs $50 million annually.
Washington will spend $2.6 million training Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job.
Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit classified nearly half of all purchases on government credit cards as improper, fraudulent, or embezzled.
Improper or fraudulent Medicare spending now totals $47 billion annually—12.4 percent of its budget.
New York distributed $140 million in stimulus money into the individual accounts of families on welfare, yet neglected to mention it was intended for school supplies (Local ATMs were depleted, and much of the money was reportedly spent on “flat screen TV’s, iPods and video gaming systems” as well as “cigarettes and beer.”)
Washington will spend $615,175 on an archive honoring the Grateful Dead.
Federal employees owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008.
Each month, taxpayers provide $40,000 worth of office space, cell phones, staff, and an SUV for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who currently works as a lobbyist for private corporations and foreign governments.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her staff have charged taxpayers $101,000 for “in-flight services”—including food and liquor—during trips on Air Force jets over the last two years.
The stimulus set aside $350 million for a national broadband coverage map—even though one private firm stated it could create one for $3.5 million.
Fannie Mae—now backed up by taxpayers—paid $6.3 million in legal defense costs for ousted executives such as Franklin Raines.
Over half of all farm subsidies go to commercial farms, which report average household incomes of $200,000.
A GAO audit found that 95 Pentagon weapons systems suffered from a combined $295 billion in cost overruns.
The refusal of many federal employees to fly coach costs taxpayers $146 million annually in flight upgrades.
More than $13 billion in Iraq aid has been classified as wasted or stolen. Another $7.8 billion cannot be accounted for.
Congress recently gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 to paint a Chinook salmon on a Boeing 737.
Washington has spent $3 billion re-sanding beaches—even as this new sand washes back into the ocean.
The Defense Department wasted $100 million on unused flight tickets and never bothered to collect refunds even though the tickets were refundable.
The federal government owns more than 50,000 vacant homes.
Taxpayers are funding paintings of high-ranking government officials at a cost of up to $50,000 apiece
The state of Washington sent $1 food stamp checks to 250,000 households in order to raise state caseload figures and trigger $43 million in additional federal funds.
Medicare officials recently mailed $50 million in erroneous refunds to 230,000 Medicare recipients.
Audits showed $34 billion worth of Department of Homeland Security contracts contained significant waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Advanced Technology Program spends $150 million annually subsidizing private businesses; 40 percent of this funding goes to Fortune 500 companies.
The Conservation Reserve program pays farmers $2 billion annually not to farm their land.

If we're so smart, why aren't we rich?
The most obvious explanation is that American college graduates are not well educated: "from 1992 to 2003 the percentage of college graduates proficient by various literacy measures was relatively low, and by two of those three indicators competency declined (prose 40 to 33 percent; document, 37 to 25 percent; and quantitative, 31 percent at both time points)." How much would one expect an illiterate college graduate to be worth?
...full-time students don't spend very much time on academics when in college, down from 40 hours per week in the early 1960s to 27 hours per week today. Time studying fell from 25 hours/week in 1961 to 13 hours/week in 2003.
With ever more Americans going to college, why aren't incomes becoming more equal?
Much of the growth in statistical income inequality within the U.S. is attributable to three factors:
(1) we decided to give most of our new wealth to a handful of people on Wall Street,
(2) the SEC prevents public company shareholders from influencing top executive pay (instead determined by the CEO's golfing buddies on the board), and
(3) we decided to welcome a lot of poorly educated immigrants into the U.S.
How does learning vary across majors?
The authors of Academically Adrift quote Americans going back to the 19th Century saying that education will be the great equalizer for the children of the poor. ...this belief turns out to be false. The more educated the parents, the better the college student will do.... Students whose parents have a bachelor's degree will, at the end of two years of college, score only about as well as freshmen whose parents have a professional or graduate degree. Students whose parents never went to college will graduate with lower scores than freshmen whose parents are doctors. [[aphar: no wonder: given that intelligence is largely heritable, college has already done everything it could to equalize the population; statistically, kids of two doctors are smarter than kids of school dropouts]]

solution: go to online colleges

read the whole review

A cursory comparison of the Harry Potter series with the Percy Jackson & the Olympians one shows that the latter is a "cheap plastic imitation" of the former.

They have much in common: set in the modern world, they modify it to contain magic (as spells and potions or ancient Greek gods); the narrative centers around a single boy with a doomsday prophecy hanging over his head; each book covers one year of his life.

The differences, however, amount to the opposite recommendation: "encourage your kid to read it" vs. "waste of time".

As mentioned above, both are centered around a single boy; the reader only knows what he knows and when he knows it (with a few trivial exceptions like conversations between the Minister of Magic with the muggle Prime Minister in the Potter series). However, the Potter series are told in the third person, which allows the author to use an excellent language with a rich vocabulary, while the Percy series is in the first person, narrated by a "dyslexic kid with an ADHD" (alas, this is no Huckleberry Finn), with hardly a single word above the grade level.

Percy is choke full of action to the degree that it becomes dull and repetitive, there is nothing mundane there; Harry is easier to relate to - he does homework and faces other ordinary day-to-day chores.

Percy is highly predictable; if you are familiar with the Greek myths, you can usually guess what is coming just from the names of the characters. Harry's adventures are more imaginative.

Percy lives in the world of girls: there are hardly any boys there "with a speaking part" (Luke early in the narrative, Nico later; note that Grover and Tyson are not humans and thus are hardly relevant) and plenty of girls which makes for a rather primitive "romantic line". Harry's world is much larger, with many different ages and both sexes amply represented for an engaging "romantic line".

Percy's world is black-and-white, with everyone being either a friend or an enemy; Harry lives in a world with just one arch-villain and no saints, people being reasonably flawed in various aspects in to various degrees.

To keep your mind in peace and harmony with the Universe, hug and kiss 8 persons every day.
Or just kick the crap out of one.
Your choice.

Requiring Algebra II in high school gains momentum nationwide:Of all of the classes offered in high school, Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates.

So, there is this optional class taken by a few smart people, who planned ahead for college; and taught well by the few teachers who qualified, in a way that was useful for college.
Now it will be required for everyone, so a lot of people will be taking it, which will require that it is taught by (probably) incompetent teachers who will be teaching it "to a test".
The net results:
A lot of people will be taking a class which is too hard and useless for them instead of learning useful skills.
People who would have taken it when it was elective, now would have to endure through the dumbed down version before progressing over to Algebra III which will take position of Algebra II as "the leading predictor of college and work success" (isn't this how Algebra II was introduced long ago?)
Idiots who are clamoring for making the AII required will start clamoring to make AIII required...

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite which infects human and rat brains, but can only breed in cats' guts. It causes rats to lose fear of cats and appears to cause schizophrenia in humans.

http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2006/01/17/the_return_of_the_puppet_masters.php