2014 Data (Released
03/11/2015)
North Carolina owes more than it
owns |
At
-$8,400, North
Carolina's
“Taxpayer's Burden” ranks
28th out of the 50
states |
North Carolina is among 39
“Sinkhole States” without enough assets to cover its debt |
Elected officials have created a
Taxpayer Burden, which is each
taxpayer's share of
state bills after its
assets available have been tapped |
TIA's Taxpayer Burden
measurement incorporates both assets and liabilities, not
just pension debt |
North Carolina has only
$24.4 billion of
assets available to pay bills totaling
$47.7 billion |
To fill the
$23.3 billion
financial hole each North Carolina taxpayer would have to
send
$8,400
to the state |
The state's financial report was
released
155
days after its fiscal year end, which is considered timely
according to the
180 day goal |
Wyoming's Wild Ride Amidst Fallen Oil Revenues
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/09/university-wyoming-faces-more-budget-crunch?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=6840125ee8-DNU20160909&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-6840125ee8-197565045&mc_cid=6840125ee8&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
. . .
Here’s what the budget
crunch looks like: the combined operating budget for the University of
Wyoming and UW Medical Education was set to be $567.5 million in the 2017
fiscal year, down from $572.8 million the year before. General fund money
from the state was to total $218.3 million, down from $245.5 million. UW
Medical Education includes a program that has medical students starting in
Wyoming and finishing their education at the University of Washington
Medical School in Seattle. It also includes two medicine residency programs
in Casper and Cheyenne, Wyo.
Those budget numbers
include the effects of a two-year, $7 million reduction the Legislature
mandated in 2016. They do not include, however, a request from Wyoming’s
governor to cut over $30 million more in the current two-year budget cycle.
The two reductions together left the university searching for ways to
compensate for the loss of $41 million in state funding over the two-year
period.
Nichols, who started at
the university in May after winning the president’s job in December,
responded to the crunch by declaring a financial crisis and calling for a
budget reduction of about $19 million for the current fiscal year. She also
said the university will need to find $15 million more in cuts for next
year.
The university has met
its reduction targets for this year, Nichols said in an interview Thursday.
It did so by eliminating vacant positions and offering early retirements.
The university also changed part-time employees’ schedules to avoid paying
some benefit costs. Faculty members were asked to teach more as well.
In total, the
university has eliminated more than 200 positions from its employment rolls,
which currently hold approximately 3,000 people, Nichols said. Many of the
departures were staff members. The university has about 820 faculty members,
down from 850 before the cuts, she said.
Continued in article
Another Obama Broken Promise
An Internet Giveaway to the U.N.: If the U.S. abdicates internet
stewardship (on Sept. 30), the United Nations might take control ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-internet-giveaway-to-the-u-n-1472421165?mod=djemMER
When the Obama administration announced its plan to
give up U.S. protection of the internet, it promised the United Nations
would never take control. But because of the administration’s naiveté or
arrogance, U.N. control is the likely result if the U.S. gives up internet
stewardship as planned at midnight on Sept. 30.
On Friday Americans for Limited Government received
a response to its Freedom of Information Act request for “all records
relating to legal and policy analysis . . . concerning antitrust issues for
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers” if the U.S. gives
up oversight. The administration replied it had “conducted a thorough search
for responsive records within its possession and control and found no
records responsive to your request.”
It’s shocking the administration admits it has no
plan for how Icann retains its antitrust exemption. The reason Icann can
operate the entire World Wide Web root zone is that it has the status of a
legal monopolist, stemming from its contract with the Commerce Department
that makes Icann an “instrumentality” of government.
Antitrust rules don’t apply to governments or
organizations operating under government control. In a 1999 case, the Second
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the monopoly on internet domains
because the Commerce Department had set “explicit terms” of the contract
relating to the “government’s policies regarding the proper administration”
of the domain system.
Without the U.S. contract, Icann would seek to be
overseen by another governmental group so as to keep its antitrust
exemption. Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of
the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much
for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a
“government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.”
Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited
Government, called it “simply stunning” that the “politically blinded Obama
administration missed the obvious point that Icann loses its antitrust
shield should the government relinquish control.”
The administration might not have considered the
antitrust issue, which would have been naive. Or perhaps in its arrogance
the administration knew all along Icann would lose its antitrust immunity
and look to the U.N. as an alternative. Congress could have voted to give
Icann an antitrust exemption, but the internet giveaway plan is too flawed
for legislative approval.
As the administration spent the past two years
preparing to give up the contract with Icann, it also stopped actively
overseeing the group. That allowed Icann to abuse its monopoly over internet
domains, which earns it hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Earlier this month, an independent review within
Icann called the organization “simply not credible” in how it handled the
application for the .inc, .llc and .llp domains. The independent review
found Icann staffers were “intimately involved” in evaluating their own
work. A company called Dot Registry had worked with officials of U.S. states
to create a system ensuring anyone using these Web addresses was a
legitimate registered company. Icann rejected Dot Registry’s application as
a community, which would have resulted in lowered fees to Icann.
Delaware’s secretary of state objected: “Legitimate
policy concerns have been systematically brushed to the curb by Icann
staffers well-skilled at manufacturing bureaucratic processes to disguise
pre-determined decisions.” Dot Registry’s lawyer, Arif Ali of the Dechert
firm, told me last week his experience made clear “Icann is not ready to
govern itself.”
Icann also refuses to award the .gay domain to
community groups representing gay people around the world. Icann’s ombudsman
recently urged his group to “put an end to this long and difficult issue” by
granting the domain. Icann prefers to earn larger fees by putting the .gay
domain up for auction among for-profit domain companies.
And Icann rejects the community application for the
.cpa domain made by the American Institute of CPAs, which along with other
accounting groups argues consumers should expect the .cpa address only to be
used by legitimate accountants, not by the highest bidder. An AICPA
spokesman told me he has a pile of paperwork three feet high on the
five-year quest for the .cpa domain. The professional group objected in a
recent appeal: “The process seems skewed toward a financial outcome that
benefits Icann itself.”
Continued in article
Free College? Why Clinton’s Plan Won’t Work ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/free-college-why-clintons-plan-wont-work-1472769722?mod=djemMER
Many states wouldn’t be able to generate the billions of dollars needed
to match federal grants.
Hillary Clinton,
buckling to pressure from her left, recently
proposed
tuition-free college education.
Students who attend in-state public colleges and universities, and whose
families have incomes less than $85,000 a year, would qualify for varying
levels of assistance. This threshold would rise to $125,000 by 2021. The
students would have to work 10 hours a week. Federal grants, matched by
state contributions, would finance the program. Estimates of the cost to the
federal government over 10 years range from $350 billion to $700 billion.
Though the
proposal is still only an outline and lacks important details, it already
has at least five serious deficiencies that make it infeasible.
Because more
than a few states will likely choose not to participate, the proposal offers
false hope to millions of future students. Tuition at public colleges and
universities has escalated in large part because state legislatures have
chosen to shift more of the tuition burden from taxpayers to students and
their families.
Under the
Clinton plan, states would have to make a policy U-turn. This politically
difficult decision would be even harder for financially strapped states.
Many legislatures would find it nearly impossible to generate the billions
of dollars needed to match federal grants.
The proposal
excludes tens of thousands of students of equal need who are ineligible
because they attend private colleges. This number could grow, as needy
students are crowded out of public colleges by an influx of applications
from well-off students who otherwise would have attended private
universities.
In providing tuition assistance only to students attending public
universities, the proposal would seriously weaken the financial and academic
strength of most private universities. A few wealthy universities such as
Harvard, Princeton and Yale could use their large endowments to offer
tuition assistance equal to the assistance under the Clinton plan. Yet most
universities lack the resources to do so. They would receive fewer
applications, and some would inevitably close.
Students who
attend universities that are large relative to their local communities—such
as Penn State in rural Pennsylvania—would not find the employment necessary
to fulfill the part-time-job requirement.
The proposal
only tangentially addresses costs. It says participating institutions should
try to do something about costs but includes no specific cost-control
requirement. It suggests that universities could use technology to lower the
costs of instruction, but many schools have been doing this for years. It
would be more effective to require colleges to rein in salaries and
administrative costs.
In striking
only a glancing blow at the cost structure of higher education, the proposal
simply shifts the burden of these costs onto taxpayers. Including the added
administrative expenses for participating universities and the state and
federal governments, the program as proposed would actually increase the
cost of a college education.
Mrs.
Clinton’s plan also ignores that more attention to the K-12 years can reduce
college costs. The president of Bard College, Leon Botstein,
suggested in his 1997 book, “ Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture,” that the
final two years of K-12 could be eliminated in favor of an early college
system. Even with a less-radical proposal, college courses could still be
introduced into the high-school curriculum.
The
foundation for such a shift has already been laid through Advanced Placement
courses, which enable high-school students to reduce their college course
requirements if they pass these courses with high grades.
The Clinton
higher-education proposal, given its myriad flaws, is currently unworkable.
A much more broadly framed debate, producing more serious proposals, will be
needed to address the rising costs of post-high-school education that so
many families face.
Mr.
Grigsby is emeritus professor of city and regional planning at the University
of Pennsylvania.
The Wonders of Renewable Energy from the Sun and Wind
Proponents of solar energy often ignore (leave out) the some of the more
obvious dangers of solar "farm" construction. The other day Erika and I were
driving in Vermont and saw a really ugly large field totally covered with solar
panels. The first thing I thought of was snow. Here in New Hampshire and Vermont
it's not uncommon to get over 6-10 feet of snow accumulation in the winter. At
what snow depth do solar panels cease working? I suppose they can be made to
melt snow, but this type of heat could be dangerous from an ecology standpoint
over an entire field. And this field that produced some type of crop for over
100 years now lies barren of vegetation ---
Solar Energy Development Environmental Considerations ----
http://solareis.anl.gov/guide/environment/
Also see
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/03/business/la-fi-green-safety-20110803
It's not uncommon these days to see entire roofs on apartment buildings
covered with solar panels. It makes me question the safety of living in the top
apartments where every inch of floor space is within 10-15 feet of solar panels
that are breaking electrons into atoms under the powerful energy of the sun. A
great deal of thought has been given to fire hazards of solar panels and their
batteries, but what about living 24/7 under electricity generation? I find very
little written about this potential safety risk? Perhaps it's a dumb question.
Because of Earth's dynamic
climate, winds and atmospheric pressure systems experience constant change.
These fluctuations may affect how our planet rotates on its axis, according to
NASA-funded research that used wind and satellite data
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030306075514.htm
The Largest Wind Farm in USA History Just Got the Green
Light (with location in Iowa still to be determined)
http://www.businessinsider.com/american-iowa-wind-farm-approval-2016-9
Jensen Comment
Even larger farms are in the wind for Federal public lands in the west, most
notably the windy state of Wyoming
The destruction of birds is an enormous risk of wind farms is not a dumb
question?
The last seven years
may have diluted that patriotic sentiment. Yet, square our national veneration
of the bald eagle with
a federal rule to
allow the rotor blades of wind turbines to butcher 4,200 bald eagles per year
for thirty years—four
times the previous limit. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), an
agency legally bound to protect wildlife and with no jurisdiction over energy,
stated that the rule’s purpose was to help spur more renewable (wind power)
installations.
http://townhall.com/columnists/kathleenhartnettwhite/2016/05/20/bald-eagles-gone-with-the-wind-n2165709?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
That's ignoring the kill of millions of other types of birds. Who cares about
birds? Except for the ones grown in containment buildings to eat they're of no
importance compared to our six foot television screens
My hope is that hydrogen cells will one day be cheap enough using ocean water
to replace the solar, windmill, coal, gas, and nuclear power generating plants
across the USA to say nothing about the tearing down of all those ugly power
lines and their towers. Let's kill them all so we can cheaply watch Colin
Kaepernick sitting out entire games --- distracting us from how poorly he now
plays football.
By the way CBS News reported last night that his jersey is the biggest seller
among all NFL jerseys for sale in the world. Businesses will now customize them
by writing "Butcher the Pigs" on the back.
The Asian American Coalition for Education lodged a complaint with
Department of Education last Wednesday, accusing Cornell and Columbia University
of discriminating against an Asian student in the admissions process ---
http://cornellsun.com/2016/08/30/cornell-columbia-accused-of-discriminating-against-asian-american-students-in-college-admissions/
Jensen Comment
Asian Americans constitute 4.8% of the USA population making them a clear
minority. Black Americans constitute 12.2%. Hispanic and Latinos constitute
16.3%. Native Americans now constitute less than 1% ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity
Of course it's possible to be prejudiced in admissions even if your admission
profile looks good relative to the above percentages. For example,
if a significant number of Asian Americans who
are rejected have much better admission credentials than other races accepted
into the university then there's some merit to the complaint of racial
discrimination. There are long-standing complaints that some prestigious
universities like Harvard that's chronically accused of discrimination against
Asian Americans.
One defense of the universities is there are relatively so few applicants
among races other than White and Asian Americans. The universities contend that
they want a more suitable racial balance in each graduating class. This often
entails acceptance of some students with weaker admission credentials relative
to rejections of those with better credentials other than race.
One counter complaint is that by lowering the admissions bar too far for some
races you're offering false hopes of graduation. I've seen anecdotal evidence
that this complaint is real just as it is most definitely real when lowering the
admissions bar for top athletes of all races who often have miserable graduation
rates.
There are no easy answers when resources like classroom space, dorm space,
and financial aid dollars are limited relative to the total number of
applicants. Courts and regulators are usually hesitant to go against the defense
of a university in affirmative action cases. Universities are in trouble if
there's evidence of discrimination against top applicants of color.
Jensen Comment
When reading the article below keep in mind that the recent auto bailout of GM
and Chrysler entailed screwing somebody. The investors who got screwed the most
were shareholders who got zero in the bailout, including all those Chrysler
employees who were once awarded a lot of shares in Chrysler. Those shares
in the "old GM" and the "old Chrysler" became wall paper. The investors who got
screwed almost as bad were creditors who were forced to accept pennies on the
dollar in what they loaned to GM and Chrysler. Autoworkers also got screwed by
having to accept much lower wages, although some would argue that previous wage
levels were union-distorted relative to skills of required for their jobs and
supplies of qualified workers who would do those jobs for much lower wages. The
Federal government also got screwed to the extent that taxpayers who lost money
on bond investments could write their capital losses off against capital gains
on their tax returns.
In the Detroit public school solution below, those that get screwed the most
are tax-exempt bond holders who previously loaned money to Detroit schools for
its huge infrastructure of buildings, athletic fields, etc. and other district
needs funded by borrowing. This type of reneging on debt can be a disaster in
any type of bankruptcy, because when you try to borrow money in the future from
the same lenders it's like going back to the well for
water that your previously poisoned.
That's why in most bankruptcies the debt is
restructured so as to give creditors more satisfaction than you give to
shareholders who knew they were accepting bankruptcy risks more than creditors.
One can argue that the Federal government should
bailout Detroit's public schools like the Federal government bailed out some
(not all) Wall Street Banks in deep trouble after the latest real estate bubble
burst. But there's a huge difference.
The bailed
out banks in a short time repaid the Federal government in full plus interest in
some cases. Detroit's bailed out schools would not repay any Federal government
bailout funds.
There's also another enormous problem with having the Federal government
bail out Detroit's schools?
Then what about Chicago's lousy schools and every other
troubled school in the 39 USA states on the verge of bankruptcy among the 50
states ---
http://www.statedatalab.org/
But public school advocates worry that the
legislation does nothing to ensure that DPS will be able to provide quality
education in the long term to compete with the growing number of charter schools
throughout Detroit. Some even argue that lawmakers may have opened the door to
an all-charter system—and potentially the end of the Detroit public schools
altogether.
"Inside Detroit’s Radical Experiment to Save Its Public Schools,"
by Josh Sanburn, Time Magazine, September 6, 2016 ---
http://time.com/4390000/detroit-public-schools-charters-debt/?xid=newsletter-brief
An unprecedented idea may help stabilize the city's
public schools—or signal their demise
When Detroit students return to school on Sept. 6,
the rodents and mold found in classrooms last year will be all but gone.
Cracked windows will be repaired. Collapsed ceilings patched up. Chipped
paint removed. Last year, not a single Detroit public school complied with
the city’s public health and safety codes, one reason teachers protested
with widespread sick-outs that temporarily crippled the system. This year,
92% of schools are in full compliance.
The most significant changes for the country’s most
challenged big-city school system, however, will be right beneath the
surface. Beyond cleaned-up classrooms, Detroit’s students will return to a
brand-new district altogether—one that isn’t saddled with mountains of debt.
This new district is the result of a radical idea: that ailing public
entities such as school systems could be overhauled like a bankrupt
business.
In June, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed a
sweeping education package to provide financial support for Detroit’s public
schools modeled on the 2009 restructuring of General Motors. The legislation
left the old district behind as a shell to pay down $515 million in
operating debt, similar to GM’s Chapter 11 that created an “old” and “new”
General Motors, with the aim of restructuring a public school system that
was all but bankrupt. Millions of dollars were allocated to repair the
district’s aging facilities, and the legislation allowed the schools—which
include some of the nation’s worst and have been under state-run emergency
management since 2009—to return to a locally run school board. “DPS is
fiscally sound now,” says John Walsh, Gov. Snyder’s director of strategy.
Snyder’s use of state-appointed emergency managers has been widely
scrutinized since the water crisis in Flint, where lead leeched into the
municipal water supply while the city’s finances were being overseen by the
state. The water crisis raised questions about Snyder’s reliance on state
managers to step in and fix local issues.
The unprecedented experiment is being closely
watched by other struggling urban public school systems around the U.S.
“There are quite a number of districts that are ending up on the brink of
bankruptcy,” says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public
Education, a research organization at the University of Washington that
supports charter schools. “There’s a lot of attention on Detroit.”
But public school advocates worry that the
legislation does nothing to ensure that DPS will be able to provide quality
education in the long term to compete with the growing number of charter
schools throughout Detroit. Some even argue that lawmakers may have
opened the door to an all-charter system—and
potentially the end of the Detroit public schools altogether.
Hitting Bottom
The rise and fall of Detroit’s schools mirrors the
city itself, which once had one of the biggest school districts in the
country, hitting peak enrollment in 1966 at 299,962 students. But the
decline of Detroit’s automobile industry brought a dramatic, decades-long
population slide for the city and its schools, with white residents
especially leaving the city for the suburbs.
In 1994, Michigan legislators passed Proposal A,
which shifted education funding from local property taxes to state taxes in
an effort designed to equalize the quality of the state’s schools across
affluent and low-income areas. The New York Times called it “the nation’s
most dramatic shift in a century in the way public schools are financed.”
The state tied funding directly to enrollment, meaning the more students a
district had, the more money it would get. Proposal A also ushered in the
city’s first charter schools, which would get state funding but operate
independently of existing school districts, something so dramatic TIME put
the realignment on its cover in October 1994 under the headline: “New Hope
for Public Schools.” The population in Detroit, however, kept falling, and
the district had difficulty adjusting to the annual loss of students and
routinely budgeted for more students than actually enrolled.
As funding declined, the district was constricted
across the board. Facilities weren’t properly maintained. Teachers were let
go. Class offerings were cut. And parents increasingly opted for charter
schools, leading to further DPS enrollment cuts. Over the last 25 years,
Detroit’s population has declined by 34%, but public school enrollment has
gone down 73%, and by 2012, charter schools were educating more students in
Detroit than public schools. The school district now has fewer than 50,000
students. Academic performance, meanwhile, has plummeted. According to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 5% of Detroit’s
fourth-graders were proficient in math in 2015 compared to 34% statewide; 6%
were proficient in reading compared to 29% across Michigan. By most
measures, DPS is the worst-performing urban school district in the state.
Students like Imani Harris have experienced DPS’s
problems up close. Two weeks into the fall semester last year, her English
teacher at Renaissance High School quit and the school couldn’t find a
qualified permanent replacement, leaving the 10th-grade English class to
lumber along for months with a series of rotating substitutes. “It wasn’t
really a class. I wasn’t learning any English,” Harris says. “A lot of
times, I just did other homework. There was a lot of anger because we were
promised we were going to get a real teacher.”
Contributing to Detroit’s problems is a tangled web
of a dozen authorizers that determine where charter schools can open or
close. Many of those authorizers are public universities and community
colleges that often don’t work together to plan comprehensively, which can
create chaotic situations in some neighborhoods. According to Detroit Mayor
Mike Duggan’s office, 80% of Detroit’s public and charter schools have
opened or closed in the last seven years.
“It’s the Wild West,” says David Arsen, an
education policy professor at Michigan State University. “There’s nothing
like it in the country. Charters are giving out computers and sneakers just
to get the kid in the door. National advocates for charters are looking at
Detroit and saying, ‘Don’t do it that way.’”
In January, DPS’s teachers began protesting the
district’s deteriorating conditions by calling in sick en masse. In May, so
many teachers held “sick-outs” that they effectively closed 94 of the city’s
97 public schools.
A New Start?
That same month, the Michigan legislature passed a
series of bills that amounted to a bailout of the district. Lawmakers gave
$617 million to Detroit’s public schools—$450 million to help retire the
district’s debt and $150 million in transition costs to create a new
district. Proponents say the measures allow the district to start fresh
while returning the schools to local control under an elected school board
rather than state-appointed emergency managers, who had been in charge for
the past seven years. “We wiped their slate clean,” says Jeff Farrington, a
Republican in the Michigan House.
DPS officials, however, say the amount of money for
transition costs is nowhere near what they need. Alycia Meriweather, the
DPS’s interim superintendent, says that $105 million of the $150 million
allocated to help get the new district up and running is already earmarked
for financial obligations from the old district while only $5 million is
available for repairing school facilities. While Detroit will be able to
spend all of the $7,400 that is allocated per student on actual education
costs this year—as opposed to last year, when $1,100 of that funding per
student went to pay the district’s debt—the district still has needs that
won’t be met, including at least eight schools that still need facility
upgrades.
“People need to have clear expectations on what can
be done with the money that’s been allocated,” Meriweather said.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Note that contrary to naive opinion, charter schools are not for-profit private
sector operations. They are taxpayer-funded public sector schools especially
legislated to have selective admission standards, often students of all races
who have higher scholastic ability. This is why the phrase "all-charter-system"
above confuses me. Charter schools are controversial in usually because they
often do not admit children with special learning needs. And they can fire bad
teachers and teachers who are chronically late or absent because their teachers
as a rule are not in protective teacher unions.
Personally I don't think charter schools are the
answer to Detroit's public school system problem except possibly for the top 10%
of the more gifted students who who would be held back by having to be mixed
among the masses in Detroit's public schools.
I think the answer probably lies with relying upon the State of Michigan to
both fund this new initiative and to negotiate the bad things out of teachers'
unions such as making it easier to fire bad teachers and teachers who are
chronically late or absent. The worst teachers in the old Detroit system should
not be rehired. And to get back into the municipal bond market the State of
Michigan will probably have to co-sign district borrowings for a time.
The good news is that the State of Michigan, unlike Illinois, is on a roll at
the moment with economic growth.
"Questioning Claims That Are Too Good to Be True," by Karen Firestone,
Harvard Business Review Blog, September 7, 2016 ---
https://hbr.org/2016/09/questioning-claims-that-are-too-good-to-be-true?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Jensen Comment
The real challenge in financial auditing is often discoveries of falsehoods that
lie outside the scope of the audit and what the auditors assert in the audit
report to financial statements. What is their professional and ethical
obligation to not ignore falsehoods that legally are "none of their business?"
This also seems to have been the dilemma of the FBI's investigation of the
Clinton emails.
The FBI admits it “didn’t pursue evidence
of potential false statements, obstruction of justice and destruction of
evidence,”
WSJ Editorial Board
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-blind-clinton-trust-1473289804?mod=djemMER
Jensen Comment
In some ways FBI pursuit of false statements is unjust if there is not also FBI
pursuit of Trump false statements.
My point here is that questioning falsehoods is not as simple as what we read
in ethics cases and textbooks and learn in law schools and accounting schools
and journalism schools.
How to Lie With Article Titles and Statistics
High-School Grades Still Count Most in College
Admissions ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/high-school-grades-still-count-most-in-college-admissions/114083?elqTrackId=0531b0ea1d19413f9d1250bd18a3c071&elq=ac209f22145749e598c673fe9d04f290&elqaid=10576&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3997
Jensen Comment
Firstly the title of the article above is misleading. This phrase "counts most"
is not quite what is claimed in the cited study.
Secondly, in things like acceptance of a college applicant, acceptance of a
marriage proposal, acceptance of a job candidate, etc. there is seldom any
criterion that is "most important" in every instance. For example, ic acceptance
of a college applicant a SAT score is probably most important in cases where the
SAT score is almost perfect. It may be of much lesser importance where it is
very low and other criteria take on greater importance such as race, gender, and
high school grades.
The most common practice, in my viewpoint, is to have acceptable ranges of
criteria where outliers are sometimes rejected outright or accepted outright.
Looks may not be the most important criterion, but grossly obese teens are
almost certainly going to have more trouble getting dates to the prom, marriage
proposals, jobs, etc. SAT scores may not be the most important criterion for
college admission, but a 100 GMAT score is likely not to be acceptable for
admission to a doctoral program except in a for-profit university.
Criteria also interact. An ugly guy (think
John Candy)
is more likely to get a date if he's one of the most popular Hollywood stars.
Nurses are not attracted to obese hospital dish washers but top surgeons in the
hospital are another matter entirely.
Having said this, grades in high school are important for admission to
colleges that also reject applicants, because grades are the major evidence
available of scholastic motivation. However, grades per se may not be as
important at trends in grades. A student who got all F grades in the 10th grade
gets a second look if she/he had straight A grades all three years thereafter.
The same can be said for a student who got all A grades in the 10th grade and
all C grades for the next two years
The hardest thing about making grades "count the
most" if college admission is the phenomenon of grade inflation over the past
four decades. Applicants to Stanford nearly all are nearly straight-A students.
How do you make "grades count the most" if you're only allowed to
accept 5% oif the applicants? Stanford, Harvard, etc. claim that the most
important criterion when comparing straight-A students is uniqueness that in
most instances entails other talents such as exceptional competitive talent
(athletics, music, theatre, ballet, writing, etc.) or public service such as
1,000+ hours of community service helping disabled children in Africa. Top
schools are also seeking balance graduating classes. A top applicant from Tibet
or Somalia may win out over a top applicant to Stanford from Palo Alto High
School.
Anti-Trust Lawsuit Outcome: Killing Off Hundreds of Thousands of American
Cows to Keep Milk Prices High ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/cow-killing-and-price-fixing-in-your-supermarket-dairy-aisle?cmpid=BBD090816_BIZ
Finding and Using Health Statistics
---
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/usestats/index.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on economic statistics and databases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
Medicare Fraud is Rampant ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/stevesherman/2016/02/05/medicare-fraud-is-rampant-n2115375?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
The government just announced some big changes to try to fix Obamacare ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/obamacare-changes-cms-insurance-markets-2016-8
The government is offering some
ideas to try to fix the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law known as
Obamacare, amid a series of missteps that have befallen President Barack
Obama's signature legislative achievement.
With Obamacare having being dogged
by negative news over the past few weeks — as
major insurers have pulled out of some public exchanges and
regulators have said the exchanges are "near collapse" —
the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, proposed a series
of changes on Monday to try to correct some of the exchange issues.
CMS, the division of the US
Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the exchanges,
proposed tweaks that would make it less risky for insurers in the
marketplace to take on sick patients.
Two of the biggest problems for the
exchanges have been a lack of young people, who help offset higher-cost
patients, signing up for insurance and generally sicker-than-expected people
getting coverage through the exchanges, leading to huge losses for some
insurers.
A few of the 14 total proposals
include:
-
Using some of the fees from the federally funded
marketplace for outreach to get more young people to sign up.
-
Strengthening rules for signing up for insurance outside
the open-enrollment period to ensure that people are not waiting until
they are sick to get coverage.
-
Take prescription-drug use into account when evaluating
the risk profile of potential patients. Previously, this had not been
taken into account, and insurers argued that it prevented them from
getting a full picture of possible patients' health status.
-
Creating more flexibility for insurers in their bronze
plan offerings to reduce cost burdens.
Kevin Counihan, the insurance
marketplace CEO at the CMS, said the proposed changes would fix numerous
issues with the exchanges.
"These proposed actions and others
we have taken over the last six months would help to: support issuers with
high-cost enrollees, while updating risk adjustment; strengthen the risk
pool; promote additional enrollment; and support issuers in entering the
Marketplace or growing their Marketplace business," Counihan wrote
in a post summarizing the proposals.
Continued in article
Citing Safety Concerns, Northwestern U. Bans Tenured 'Gadfly' Professor
From Campus ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Citing-Safety-Concerns/237692?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=75ced598105a490d81188309d50f850d&elq=8a751280b48448b99b32b10980a22545&elqaid=10544&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3973
Also see
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/09/the-strange-case-of-political-science-professor-jacqueline-stevens-at-northwestern.html
Jensen Comment
A lot of professors taking the side of Jacqueline Stevens might be less vocal in
support if the professor in question was a pistol-packing male member of a
white-supremacy clan and tenured professor on the University of Texas
campus teaching a controversial (horrors) conservative economics course.
This article touches on the enormous gray zone between people who have been
treated for mental illness and those whose behavior raises concerns that they
should be being treated. This is a special problem that the FBI has in dong
background checks for buy firearms.
This article avoids the controversial difference between the safety of an
instructor's superiors versus the safety concerns of the inst
Assisted suicide is legal in Canada but no one knows how many are choosing
to die ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/assisted-suicide-is-legal-in-canada-but-no-one-knows-how-many-are-choosing-to-die-2016-9
How Outer Space Dulls an Astronaut’s Mind ---
http://nautil.us/blog/how-outer-space-dulls-an-astronauts-mind