Clever. You know that bit in Dr. Strangelove where they say "The point of a deterrent is lost when you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world?" I'm getting that feeling, but in reverse. Why did they announce it?

I don't like saying it's not persecution because homeschooling is not an immutable characteristic. Religion is not an immutable characteristic, people are free to change it at any time, but people suffer persecution for religion anyways.

There's also the question of precedents. Supposing that these folks are deported, we end up with the precedent that denying someone access to homeschooling does not constitute persecution. If nothing else that's reason enough for the HSLDA to take up the case.

Not sure how I'd rule on this.

As a Wisconsinite I feel it is my moral duty to disparage Illinois drivers.

With that out of the way, I tend to view driving as a social interaction. I drive in such a way as to make it easier for the other drives to not crash. I mean, except for that jerk tailgating me. I vary my speed with traffic. I will pass or not pass as the situation demands it.

None of this is sufficient to make me a good driver.

Four posts Mr. Cole? I'm flattered. But why did you leave such an obvious rejoinder open?

"This works so well on the mainstream media..."

To be clear here, I'm not trying to defend the current system. I brought up the AMA precisely because it's an example of crony capitalism. In the sense that nobody ever offered a bribe who didn't intend to profit by it one could even expect such entities to be more corrupt. I expect they'd be less likely to write completely asinine regulations because of their practical experience and financial stake, but I wouldn't guarantee it.

Making the regulations optional and the insurance voluntary would help lessen the corruption, but such things often have or acquire the practical weight of law, which leaves you in the same boat. I suggest simpler regulations not because I expect they'd fix the problem (hello, commerce clause), but because it's harder to game a simpler set of rules.

Another question for the libertarian side of the argument: Why should I assume a private licensing agency will be less corrupt than a state one? Supposing said organization has skin in the game, isn't there as much or more incentive for them to tighten licensing requirements to keep competitors out of the field? Remember how the AMA lobbied in favor of obamacare?

And specifically for Mr. Shafer, if OSHA is mandating you use third party standards, how is that not conducive to crony capitalism? The law says you have to use UL (a regulatory organization I presume, I don't do much electrical work). If it allows for other organizations, what stops OSHA from changing the law to make a de facto monopoly? You have all the incentives for crony capitalism to work.

In my opinion, licensing (of any kind) wouldn't be nearly as onerous if the regulations were written with brevity and simplicity as overriding concerns.

Sometimes I reread books to garner insight that I missed the first time around. Till we Have Faces  by C.S. Lewis springs to mind. Most of the time though when I'm rereading the book it's to borrow from the simple pleasure I got from reading it the first time. I get that from a lot of the less pretentious fantasy and science fiction stuff. Heinlein's young adult novels, or the Discworld books work here.

Then again, there are books I can read for the first time that qualify. This morning I've been reading Gods of Mars  by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it's effectively interchangeable between any number of other John Carter or Tarzan books I've read. Which is exactly what I was looking for when I picked it up.

Thank you for the story. That was fun to read, if not to experience.

That's a lot of brooms. How many do you have in one room? In one school? Would there odds go up if they had the kind with a wooden handle, instead of bundles of reeds (as it looks in the photo).

I could see having a broom and knowing how to use it might be enough to stop someone with a knife, but it seems less likely if they've got guns. Unless everyone takes their broom and mobs him.

I don't think this holds up. I've certainly read a number of science fiction stories by authors with sound grasp of physics that nevertheless ignore this sort of thing to tell a good story. If you want to write about things happening on other planets you've got to get your heroes there somehow, and discourses on the method are only interesting so many times.

Analogously, in C.S. Lewis' Space trilogy the protagonist learns to communicate with alien species because he is a linguist by trade. In Star Trek they have universal translators, not because it's a reasonable invention but because they need some way to talk to different aliens in each episode. Watching the linguists work each and every time would be pretty dull.

Heinlein didn't predict the water bed, he invented it. If I remember correctly (no guarantee) he spent long hours in a hospital bed after his medical discharge, which gave him reason to think of the idea. He never made use of it until Stranger in a Strange Land. Someone reading his book saw the potential and went out and built the thing.

I've heard about this sort of thing before.  If you read about the great mathematicicans in their younger years you get this all the time; there's a story where Hardy was given the busywork of adding up all the numbers to 100, and solved it in five minutes. Richard Feynman in high school invented his own symbols for sines and cosines and so forth.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea to make ordinary nitwits match up with the geniuses of history. Supposing you got a future genius in your classroom, do you think he'd be able to explain his methods to the other students?

One thing to remember about automation is that it's a diminishing returns relationship. The first robot you hire does something mindlessly routine, like the bolt tightening bit from modern times. You can keep automating processes, but each time your gains are a little less. The tasks become less obvious and the machine gets harder to program.

You say QuickBooks is taking away jobs? fine. If I had half a dozen accounting jobs a century ago, QuickBooks takes away four. It'll be loads more expensive to take away that fifth, and that sixth job is never gonna be automated.

You want a more concrete example? Welding. You can program robots to weld things in assembly lines (Harley Davidson does for building bike frames, for example). But you always need welders for repairing things. Large things made of steel are expensive, so much so that it's almost always cheaper to fix one than to buy a new one. When you're fixing a broken something you can't control when and where and how it needs a weld, so you pay for someone's independent human judgement to hold that torch.

According to current theories of physics, a black hole is mostly just empty space. Its perimeter or “event horizon” is not a material surface, but just a hypothetical location that marks the point of no return.

See, this sort of thing really annoys me. They take pains to define the event horizon as the point where you can no longer measure stuff (because light can't yadda yadda), but then they don't offer anything about WHY they think it's mostly empty space beyond that. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation but the scientist dumbed it down so the journalist could understand it, who dumbed it down further for what he presumes the troglodytes who read him can understand.

That's one of the reasons I don't read much popular science. Err, not just the magazine. The other one might be present here too--maybe there isn't a perfectly good explanation. I've spent enough time reading about quantum mechanics to know that physicists as much as anybody are just as susceptible to putting their own interpretations on stuff that can't be tested or proven.

Because, as far as we know. gravity is neither. What makes something move? Gravity makes things fall. Magnets can pull metals around. So can my cat. Broadly speaking, a century or so ago we'd gotten it down to four basic forces. Electromagnetism (which includes light, baseball bats and steam  amongst almost everything else), two types of nuclear force (generally irrelevant yet they do power atom bombs), and gravity. Maxwell pushed science forward by figuring out that electric and magnetic fields produce light, that really they're all the same thing. We've been trying to do the same with the other three ever since. Thats what they mean when they say "Unified Field Theory". Last I heard they'd figured out how to put the two nuclear forces in, but not gravity.

But hey, I haven't been paying much attention to that Higgs Boson rot, maybe they got it and I didn't hear.

Really? I tend to reject the multiverse model precisely because I find it less emotionally satisfying. Specifically, it allows hack writers cover for their laziness.

With respect to a rationale for an iterated universe, In Arthur C. Clarke's later Rama novels he suggests that god spins out universes in order to determine the set of all possible starting conditions that would eventually lead to a harmonious outcome. It's a staggering idea, but I always thought his god was too small. When I say "omniscient" I mean omniscient.

Tell me, where does a politician go when he finishes with politics? He moves into his brand new office on K street. The problem I see with term limits is that it doesn't stop a self serving office holder from using one term to set up his future.

Maybe if we raised the minimum age of office to something like sixty...