Public Education - Where Should the Money Go?

Why should the government be responsible for paying for my kids education?  After all, he is my kid so why should local, state, or federal tax money go to improve his education?

Because the USA will benefit from my son being educated.  The State (meaning local, state and federal governments) will benefit by my son making more money, which means he will spend more, so in both cases he will contribute to the economy and the tax base.

So from that perspective what is the best way for the State to invest in our kids education?  By giving the money directly to the schools and have them decide what the best education is?  Or by having the money follow the child so that the parents can decide the best school to send their child to.

I prefer the later as this increases the competition between schools which should in theory lead to a better education experience.  The first choice, giving the school the money, leads to an Education Monopoly and we all know that Monopolies are a Bad Thing.

Ben Stein Smacks Hollywood

Missed Tributes.

 

Ben Stein, author, lawyer and actor, shares some thoughts on the Oscars.  He also points out how hollow the Hollywood Elites are in the face of real world crises.

Rails 1.1: RJS, Active Record++, respond_to, integration tests, and 500 other things!

Rails has hit version 1.1.  I seriously need to download Rails and make some sites!

What I would really like to do is get a web server running at home and server up maps, mono and rails just because I can.

Rails 1.1: RJS, Active Record++, respond_to, integration tests, and 500 other things!.

My First WTF Experiance

OK, so I have seen bad code in the past.  Hell, I’ve written some pretty bad code in the past, present and will in the future.  But what I am looking at right now just blows my freaking mind.

A stored procedure that generates dynamic SQL to parse an XML document stored in a table which then somehow drives a cursor to fetch one row from something the dynamic sql calls that then drives another cursor that uses OPENXML to get data from another xml document.

I can’t figure it out!  Why?  Who was the clever SOB that thought this could even remotely be a good idea?

WTF?!!?