I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

Putting it up to her mouth acts as a resonator adding volume but it also adds the overtones that the mouth cavity can create a la Tuvan Throat singing or Tibetan Monk singing to add notes from the overtone scale.

Actually... no. You probably didn't realize the small air holes that are already in the plastiglass for humidity issues. It is simply there to a) keep your grubby hands off the REAL glass protecting you from the outside elements, and b) smoothes out the internal lining because otherwise there would be a large cavity between the inner wall and outer glass. Leaving a shelf next to the social public leads to a lot of garbage being left on it to clean up later.

You're going to like this one:

Attorney Justin Moore said Jones “was dealing with a minor car issue after accidentally triggering his alarm and being unable to disable the security system” when police arrived. According to Moore, Jones was then “commanded to step out of his vehicle.”

When he exited his vehicle he tried to “explain the issue” and he was then “shot once in the stomach” by the unidentified Mesquite police officer, Moore said.

"Several officers then attacked Mr. Jones and attempted to perform an anal cavity search on the streets. Mr. Jones reacted to the unlawful sodomy and was consequently shot a second time in the back,” according to Moore.

I would say that Stalin, the Kin Jong's, Various African Tribal Genocides, and Pol Pot might disagree with your account of wholesale slaughter being reserved for the 'white' Europeans and their descendants. That is just to name a few. Also, what is a 'white' European? I mean the southern Europeans have quite a bit of Moorish blood in them, do they still count as 'white'?

All sarcasm aside, your argument is extremely flawed. Conquerors tend to lay waste to the societies they conquer, not always in terms of total lives lost, but in terms of cultural death. The reason why 'white' people are vilified for this lately is because for the past several hundred years they have been the ones expanding and taking over the regions you speak of. This is not exclusive to a skin color or originating locale, it is absolutely a core of our human nature.

I gave some examples earlier of non-European conquerors, but they are fairly recent. If we look in history at other groups, we find the same meme. The Steppe Horse Tribes were BRUTAL to cities and countries that did not capitulate. Look up "Measuring against the linchpin". That saying came from the fact that if you resisted Mongol rule, they would slaughter every male taller than the linchpin of a wagon wheel. The Aztecs and Mayans ruled southern American empires through great brutality, including human sacrifice for 'religious' purposes. Recent discoveries even indicate that it was considered a good omen if the sacrifices were crying in pain before they were to die. Remains recently found showed "All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry."

Slavery originated as early as human recorded history, if not sooner. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Although slavery in some form or another existed in most European countries, it wasn't until after contact with the Arabic African slave traders that it soared in the 15th and 16th centuries.

tl;dr

You are referring to recent history to make an example while completely ignoring THOUSANDS of years of similar history. All humanity is flawed, narrowing it down to a singular group with cherry picked data is not going to persuade anyone with a brain.

Sadly this seems very plausible after the series I just watched on Netflix , Border Security, Australia's First Line. If people think we treat incoming people rough, they should watch that show. Almost every episode they show some poor sad sack that committed a crime or something 20+ years ago that just wants to come and visit. Most of the time the response is gtfo and don't come back for 3 years, except for one guy who did 12 years in prison for drug trafficking. He just happened to be Sugar Shane Mosley's trainer, so they were like "We should by all rights deny his visa, but we have to weigh the benefit to Australia's citizens that might have bought tickets to the fight....yep, let him in." Or they have a sniffer scanner that picks up what seems to be infinitesimal amounts of any sort of drug residue, which means you get body searched and they go through every thing you have with a fine toothed comb.

I turned to my wife and said, "We are never going to Australia." She asked why and I told her that every bit of the US cash anyone comes into contact with is inundated with multiple types of drug residues. We would probably show up and get cavity searched for 14 different types of drugs. Anyway, after watching the show, I felt it was clear that the government of Australia is very comfortable with the "Come here, spend shitloads of money, and then gtfo because we don't want you here" attitude.

$15,000 dildo sounds totally worth it. https://www.lelo.com/inez

Thor Buckswallow writes:
"This is the kind of toy that only comes around once in a lifetime. When you first insert this gorgeous pleasure rod into your hoo hah, your toes will curl while your left arm goes numb as receptors fly across your body delivering messages that could end world hunger. The first time I unboxed this hedonist pole and rammed it like a battering ram into the door of a third-world immigrant living in Germany into my vaginal cavity, I screamed so loud that my neighbors (who live 3 miles away on their own estate) called the police. I had to pay off the local police chief so he would bury the incident. Not a negative, though, since paying the local authorities off so they wouldn't interfere with the weekend torture rituals was on my to-do list anyways! LOL! Great product, would recommend."


Although I 'll be spending my hard earned money on this special treat.

"Earl", Quite simply the most distinguished gentleman’s plug in the world, is the finest butt plug in the land and for $2590 a bargain. https://www.lelo.com/earl

Not bad for some fish. Fish with thinner skin, or harder to remove scales might not do as well.
I'm more than a little surprised he didn't blast right through the skin and into the meat...or into the open body cavity. Clearly he's had practice.

The Quick Clot stuff, used when it isn't supposed to be, irritates the living daylights out of surgeons because they end up having to debride (Cut away) lots of tissue they wouldn't have to otherwise.

But this seems like a brilliant response to military grade gunshot and shrapnel wounds, where the entrance hole is small, then the body cavity is large (from the expansion of the bullet)---

Useful and will save lives and doing it while saving tissue.

I'd rather have men search my cavities than exploring this.

Better adjust your hat for the camera, don't want to look disheveled while working in a dead animal's cavity.

If it were done as a single nerve in a direct route, it would be subject to damage from a jerking head motion. This way, the slack (and bundling) adds protection to individual nerves. And again, it works just fine, in ALL mammals.

Let's coin a new term. How about 'stress relief'?

Another point. The heart is functional before it descends into an expanding chest cavity, taking ancillary nerves along for the ride.

And lastly, the evidence points to incremental phenotypic alterations along with some jumps here and there. The first is indicative of environmental adaptations, with possible genetic manipulations [ID] on occasion.

In fact, we ourselves are on the cusp of being able to alter phenotypic outcomes, by PCR, electrophoresis, and subsequent spicing to alter structures and codes. For our progress at this point, search 'genetic engineering'.

While not proof of prior gene altering to alter phenotypes, it is at least evidence that it can be done, while at this juncture, no substantiating evidence exists for random mutations, HGT, and genetic drift to radically alter body plans. Just for minor quantitative adaptive alterations [pigmentation, bone density, fur and hair content, metabolism rates, and yes, cephalic index, essentially brain size increases].

IOW, the evidence clearly points to both microevolution, a likely 'designed-in' function to aid in survival, as well as ID for radical re-designs, possibly by multiple intelligentsia over vast time. Google MDT for more on that possibility.

Heheh. At this point I feel confident they won't become candyholics whenever they first taste it because we're effectively cultivating a preference for savory over sweet.

Yep, they have no idea what juice is; they only drink milk and water. They only know that candy is the stuff they pick up and play with at the store, but they put it back before we check out; they know it has lots of sugar and will give them cavities (but they don't actually know the word "candy"). They only know what an ice cream cone is from books and TV, but they've never seen one in person.

Whenever we do give them something very sweet, such as fresh fruit or a taste of our frozen yogurt, they often won't eat it complaining that it's too sweet (just like they are).

These roads would be 1 part of the solution. Cheap stable energy storage connected to "the grid" is the other part. Even if all the roads generate energy in the daytime, it has to be stored somewhere. Lead acid batteries have a good density/cost ratio, but require a lot of maintenance. Pumping water uphill or pressurizing underground cavity are other options in use today.

The biggest problem I see is dirt. The roads get dirty, they are less efficient. How much energy do we spend cleaning them?

They can only grow cavities if you let them.

Edited to add - You should be in awe at the fact you can afford or are privileged in some way to actually go to a dentist. Shitty analogy in my opinion.