And the unemployment rate doesn’t include people without jobs who have stopped looking, or those who have settled for part-time jobs. Counting those people, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest since at least 1994.

Economists had expected unemployment to rise to no more than 9.9 percent, up just a tick from September’s 9.8 percent, and the surprising jump added to fears that the recovery could fizzle if Americans don’t spend.

Already, consumer confidence for October came in well below what analysts were expecting. Shoppers’ sentiments about the state of the economy are the gloomiest in nearly three decades.

IceRocket tags: econolypse

econolypse

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Letting children sleep late on weekends and holidays might help them avoid becoming overweight or obese, a new study suggests.

Researchers in Hong Kong found that children who got less sleep tended to be heavier (as measured by body mass index, or BMI) than children who slept more. But among children who slept less than eight hours a night, those who compensated for their weekday sleep deficit by sleeping late on weekends or holidays were significantly less likely to be overweight or obese.

The study, which confirmed previous research linking sleep deficits to obesity in children, also found that, on average, children slept significantly longer on weekends and holidays than on school weekdays. However, the overweight children tended to get less weekend/holiday sleep than their normal-weight peers.

Or how about cutting some time off of the beginning of the school day? Does anyone seriously believe that half-asleep kids are learning anything? And get rid of most of the homework. When MJ was younger, he often spent his entire time after school working on homework. It was really frustrating, because he was so busy trying to do the busywork that he wasn’t learning anything. Once I started limiting his homework time, he started learning a lot more–although most of it was not whatever the class was covering at the time–and doing a lot of reading on his own.

The time after school can best be spent doing what we did: playing in groups with other children who live nearby with little or no adult supervision. This is where people learn to get along and especially how to deal with people who are not pleasant. We didn’t shoot each other, because we had already learned to deal with problems, generally without resorting to violence (although fighting was sometimes necessary). By not allowing our young to learn these things (because their lives are spent with school-related activities, complete with the constant presence of adult supervisors), they bring that dependence on adult supervision to arbitrate disputes, instead of learning to work through them.

I still remember my school years, even though many years have passed. That is why I oppose calls for increased time in school and increased school intrusion into the home. Just as you need time to unwind after a hard day of work, students need time away from schooling and its effluents, such as homework and school-sponsored day care / tutoring programs. One of the key reasons college students learn so much more than high school students is that college students are in the classroom much, much less. They learn to find time for themselves, even while scheduling an increased homework load. Personally, I think that starting the day at ten in the morning and ending it by two or three in the afternoon is likely to increase performance, if and only if schools don’t fill that time with busy work.

length of the school day

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When The World Changes Around You, You Must Change With It

Many times, when we are starting a business, we start with what we already know. We act as though the world we live in has always been the same, and that the business models that our former employers utilized are necessarily the best ones for us. A look at the history of the world’s climate should be enough to remove that idea. N3TM0uSe

Just as the Vikings found Greenland a warm and hospitable place 1,000 years ago, but were driven out by cold temperatures a few hundred years later as part of a changing climate, so too yesterday’s business models were built upon the social, legal and economic situation in the preceding years, and the business models of today are likewise built upon the social, legal, and economic situation of the recent past. What exists today may not work in a decade, simply because the world is not the same place today as it was ten years ago, and it won’t be the same place ten years from now as it is now.

Newspaper Example

Fifty years ago, publishing a newspaper was a high-margin business. The returns were high, and the barriers to entry were also high. This enabled thousands of local papers to support large editorial, production, and distribution staffs. But the world was changing. First of all, there had been two world wars and a global economic depression within the previous two or three generations, so the nation was now aware that people needed to be aware of overseas events. This really made wire services, such as UPI and the AP, an important part of a paper’s story collection process. Social and economic change was coming to the nation, too. And radio and the new thing, television, were starting to provide news at no cost to the audience.

Thirty years ago, the newspaper industry was starting to show the first signs of pressure. In major cities, the Justice Dept. started allowing two major local papers to share production (printing) and distribution operations, as long as their editorial operations remained competitors. Twenty-five years ago, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner closed down, leading to an exceptionally profitable few years at their rival Los Angeles Times. But KNXT-TV2 (now KCBS) added local news broadcasts from 4:30 PM until the network news. Local AM radio stations KFWB (960 kHz) and KNX (1070 kHz) were and are all-news stations, with sports, traffic, and all the top stories of local or national significance covered every half hour. Again, this comes without any out-of-pocket costs to their listeners.

In the late 1990s, Time Warner, which is both a publisher and a broadcaster, saw the rise of the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, and knew they needed to be involved. They launched Pathfinder. Over the next few years, they and other media companies experimented with models: paid subscribers only, split access (some for paid, some for unpaid with memberships, some for anyone), ad-supported sites, and e-mail blasts (with or without an actual web-resident story). With few exceptions, none of those has worked out–the papers are looking for something with high enough returns to allow them to keep their cost structures, and it isn’t going to work.

Now you will hear publishers blaming the Web for their losses: “If it wasn’t for sites like Google and Yahoo plastering our headlines and story summaries on their sites, we’d be able to charge people to read our stories,” they say. Unfortunately, that isn’t really true. Google and Yahoo generally link back to the original site, so that people who choose to read it see whatever advertising or “buy a subscription” messages the paper chooses to put up. There are definitely content-stealing sites (they also plague bloggers, such as myself) but they aren’t the major reason that papers are in trouble–the world has changed, and they are still trying to live somewhere that no longer exists.

Rationale

In my business classes when I was in college, I learned that high returns tend to attract new entrants into the market. But they also seem to attract competition from “replacement products”. For example, if the price of automobiles gets too high, people can purchase other products and services to get them from point A to point B, including bicycles, motorcycles, skateboards, hang gliders, commuter rail lines, bus routes, running / jogging / walking and so on.

Likewise, high costs of entry tend to keep competitors out of the market, raising prices and profits. In the case of the newspaper industry, the high capital costs of printing plants tended to keep the number of competitors low. The broadcasting industry is also fairly capital intensive, what with the limited availability of licenses, the cost of transmitters and antennas, and the constant flow of electricity. Building a business in a field with high capital costs and high barriers to entry tends to be profitable, unless something changes. When change comes, it often sweeps away even entrenched companies.

Cruise Control

In effect, our entire business has been pretty much on cruise control … for the past several months we’ve been neglecting many important tasks and just letting our business coast. –Steve from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

A successful business has a business model that is working. Such a business also has a number of other factors working on its behalf, including some that the owner(s) and manager(s) may not know about. For example, the United States automobile industry benefited from a combination of the legal environment, the economy in the 1900 to 1970 period, a huge unified market, and wide availability of (motor) fuels. It wasn’t necessarily the quality of their products or their management prowess that made Detroit the world leader in motor vehicles. When things changed, these companies started a long-term decline that continues to this day.

Operating your business successfully means taking an occasional look at your market and at the situation that supports your business. You want to understand what circumstances are contributing to your company’s success, so that you will be aware when changes could upend it. Your business model can be considered a simple sentence or two that describes how you make (or intend to make) money. For example, the model for Twitter, the popular “micro-blogging” service, could be described this way: get as many users as possible, while raising lots of venture capital, then figure out what to do about earning money. (NOTE: This probably won’t work for you, so don’t even think about it.) Anyway, remember that there is more to your success or failure than your good looks or smart decision-making, and if those things change, your business could be on the rocks like the auto companies were.

It is important that you have a clear idea in mind of what your business will do to make money, your business model. If your plan is to make money when people walk into your store to buy products, emphasize that in the choices and decisions you make. If your plan is to sell products to the stores, so the stores will have something to sell, then make sure to prioritize this in your decisions and choices. Your product line may change, your industry may change, but if you don’t understand your business model, you will still find it difficult to succeed.

IceRocket tags: Small Business Management

small business management

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Peppi is worried that more kids would drop out instead of staying in school.

“We don’t want that,” Peppi says. “We’re trying to put back in to school. To stay out of poverty and hopefully keep the college rates going up.”

George says there’s one positive to President Obama’s idea of having schools in session on some Saturdays.

“We’re providing food and safety and having them here as opposed to having them out where we don’t have control of them,” George says.

But George says the process would take a lot of time and planning to extend the school year.

George says the President should look at all the options before proposing the idea of shortening summers for kids.

He says they should look at test scores throughout the nation before coming to a decision.

Mr. President, I appreciate what you are trying to accomplish, but you are going about it totally bass-ackwards. The problems with our schools are not caused by students not spending enough time in class. You yourself should know that our thirteen year school program covers subject matter that most students can probably absorb in seven years. Making it the equivalent of fifteen or sixteen years to cover this content isn’t going to help much.

Instead, we need to ask ourselves why high school graduates cannot count back change, but they are fully versed in the pseudoscience of humans’ activities destroying the planet. We need to ask ourselves why we insist on trying to make every student’s education identical, when our job market demands that students be given individualized and specialized training. We need to ask ourselves why so many educational decisions are being made in Washington DC and in state capitals like Sacramento, when the people who best know what children need are his or her parents and teacher(s).

I submit that our present “make students meet a certain score on a standardized test or we punish the school” environment is doomed to failure. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, most students that finished school were going on to a factory somewhere. They were not individuals, but were instead more or less identical cogs in the wheel of the factory’s production mechanism. Schools were really good at supplying the identically-trained laborers that this set-up needed.

The national and world economies changed since those days. Asia is our “factory district”, where large numbers of identically-trained graduates can be employed. Americans have historically not been into docilely accepting the dictates from on high, which is why factories spawned unions here. You will no doubt have noticed that China’s factories do not seem to attract organized labor. Nor does their society tolerate the little bit of resistance that may spring up. So when Asian nations spend longer days, six days per week, all year long in school learning, they are not learning to be inventive or creative. They are learning to be interchangeable parts of a machine. Since the United States is long past that stage, we need to let the whole idea of top-down, standardized, near-identical instructional programs die a well-deserved death.

These days, there is really not even a reason to have students congregate in classrooms beyond fourth, fifth, or sixth grade. Students should be pursuing their education through individualized online instruction, including a very prominent Internet research component. About the only reasons for on-campus meetings are physical education classes, team sports, and performing arts programs. There is therefore no need for uniforms, for anti-cell-phone policies, for repressive policies about hair color, or for overpaid administrators such as “assistant deputy superintendent for student discipline”.

We could even get rid of most homework. It isn’t like homework helps with learning. After you’ve sat in the classroom for six hours, taking the pain of schoolwork home just does not help for most subjects. I remember MJ spending his entire after-school day doing homework. All it did was frustrate him, until I decided that it was time to stop spending all our time chasing an unattainable goal. We got a book, a long one, and spent most of his after-school time reading (he still did some homework). By the end of the year, he was getting kudos as “most improved” student in his classes. Why? Because we stopped burying him in the homework that was sent home and focused on the area where he was having problems.

And you see, that is what is wrong with most homework. The student and the teacher is buried in frustrating busy-work. Some students already get it, and the homework bores them with unending repetition. Other students don’t get it, but the homework keeps them from having the time or motivation to focus on the things they are missing. Reading and math I concede should be assigned, but history? Science? “Language”? Get real. You know better.

Let me make it clear that I like history. Yet, I have to be honest. Most school history is taught as a series of events and explanations that come down from the mountain. If the students don’t understand or absorb it, assigning homework is not going to help. Science, unfortunately, is taught the same way, through guided reading in a text book, followed by “study questions”. Taking more of the same home does not make it stickier.

If we want to help improve our schools, we can start by getting the federal and state governments to minimize their involvement, including funding, and letting local parents and teachers have most of the say in what is taught, how it is taught, and how that teaching is funded. Fire almost all educrats (the parasitic educational bureaucrats that stifle teachers and resist parents’ input into how their children are instructed) above the level of principal (and get rid of assistant principals and other unneeded hangers-on), and make that principal directly responsible to a committee of parents. Make parents and local residents aware that schools cost them money, so they’d better seek the highest return on investment they can get.

In this way, parents are fully-invested in their children’s education, and will not hesitate to prescribe additional study or to enforce school-assigned additional study. Parents will not hesitate to assist with student discipline problems. Parents will get involved in school “parent night” events. Parents will seek to motivate their offspring to achieve and accomplish.

Look, Mr. President, I know you’ll never read this. I really wish you would, because you could really help the country if you listen to what I am saying here. I know how much the federal government wants to help with every conceivable problem. But the truth is, education is necessarily a local issue, as local as the school little Johnny attends and the home or apartment where little Johnny and one or more of his parents lives. There is no “one size fits all” solution, and this means that the closer that a solution gets to the local level, the better it can fit the need. Every town and city in America needs to understand that schools can’t be fixed on the cheap, but that we can’t pawn off the responsibility to far-away state and federal agencies that don’t even know the individual parents, teachers, and students.

Parents React To President’s Plan For More School Time – KWQC-TV6 News and Weather For The Quad Cities -

Hammill is a dad of two kids in the Davenport School District. He’s also a cook and works weekends. As is, he feels he doesn’t have enough time with his kids and does not want them in school longer.

…

Hammill says after-school time is also education, but with mom and dad, and he’s not the only one who doesn’t want the school day lengthened.

“For a parent who works full-time, we struggle already. We maybe get two hours a night together. By the time we’re done with showers and homework the night’s already over with,” Kerri Baumer, a mother of one said.

In our Southern California district, students who weren’t doing so well were required to take Summer school classes to make up what they missed. I never understood the reasoning: the school had students for most of their waking hours for about nine months. If they couldn’t teach the subject in nine months, stealing the kids’ relax and enjoy time isn’t going to make a difference. And sure enough, it didn’t.

IceRocket tags: Education, Politics

Education, Politics

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The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.

This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights — based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.

IceRocket tags: Corporate Rights, Supreme Court

Corporate Rights, Supreme Court

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