I don’t think there has been any equal to the effort that went into the moonshot; the massive deployment of men and money that went into placing 2 men on the moon’s surface is probably still without modern parallel. Maybe the cracking of the human genome could be regarded as close, in the modern equivalent of effort expended, but “if they can crack the human genome then why can’t they get the OSX iPod Updater under 66Mb?” doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

all these comments overlook one essential fact : They have NEVER Put a man on the moon ! !@ !

The greatest hoax of the 20th Century .

RE T-mobile – my friend has service with them. He has taken to calling it tenuous-mobile due to the frequent drops and no service areas. I don’t think he will renew when his contract expires in 6 months.

They do make a portable phone that can get coverage not only anywhere on the MIT campus, but anywhere on the planet. The first one of these was called Iridium. Now there are a number of satellite phones. I frequently hear them on the news as journalists phone in reports from many a desolate location with no phone service.

Frank – I doubt the California teachers have both winter and summer homes.. But certainly in the Midwest they could. Only job more cake than teaching is fire fighting. Or being a pilot for the majors. Now that is *real* cake.

Gary – A lot of Calis problems also come from all the illegal immigration and the social services to support them.

The school teachers make up fake receipts totaling $2500 so they can get a write off on their taxes. These teachers tend to itemize their deductions because they have two houses: one for the winter and a summer “cottage.” Go look at your public tax records and see the salaries of the teachers in your district. Again, teacher and administrator salary records are not very accessable unless a private individual makes the effort to collect and distribute this “public” information. Teachers and school administrators are hiding behind the “its for the children” excuse.

Johnny,
That is exactly my point. Prop 13 was passed in 1978. Since that time, california schools have gone “from first to worst”:

http://www.pbs.org/merrow/tv/ftw/prop13.html

We should all beware of tax reforms that target some unspecified or fallacious waste.

Dan, how about; If they can sequence the human genome, then why can’t federal money be used to advance technology for organ replacement?

In a quick browse of the comments, I notice some posters bring up good-seeming points (when skimmed quickly on the way down to the textarea where I get to type this, anyway) about it not really being a question of technology or advancement, etc., but when I read Philip’s question, the response I had was: “If they can sequence the human genome, how come they can’t X?”

Not sure I would necessarily let that go without argument if someone used it on me, though. Still, I think it works.

Kalifornia should actually be a more fair system than any other. The state ends up funding the education instead of the localities. In fact they have another “prop” that says schools budgets cannot be cut. . They want the cake but don’t want to pay for it.

In Illinois and most of the country the wealthy areas spend much more per pupil than the poor areas. Illinois students rank #1 in standardized test scores. And this includes the city of Chicago, so I don’t mind too much that teachers make that much money. At least here they are delivering results for it. Meanwhile in the last 20 years California has gone from being #1 to near bottom in scores.

Frank and Johnny,
I think that you are making serious logical errors when you equate administrators salaries with teachers salaries. Let me try and enumerate them.

1. Teachers are in the teachers union, administrators are not. There is no logical connection between high administrator salaries and the actions of teachers unions.

2. In an efficient school system, a small number of administrators will leverage their services against a large number of schools. In the business sector we reward executives that leverage their skills against a large number of businesses (think Buffet).

3. In my fair city, there are 24 grade school districts and 5 high school districts. This is grossly inefficient, but it is kept in place bu the residents of wealthy districts that want to isolate their tax money from the poorer school districts.

4. In california the legacy of prop 13 (tax reform) has been the near destruction of the public school system. Aside from giving us ’street culture’ what else has prop 13 done but isolate the wealthy from the poor.

5. Any political party that seeks to take funds away from the public school system is one that benefits from an ignorant electorate.

And that leaves me with:

If our society can educate the entire baby boom generation, why do the baby boomers refuse to provide a free public education to the generations that follow.