US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1500

On December 03 2014 07:52 Mohdoo wrote:


It's pure statistics. If the same statistic was true for blacks, I'd also support it. Racism sensitivity be damned. Ethnic/cultural sensitivity has no place in science/health.

Do it or else. Increasingly, that's the message from employers who are offering financial incentives to workers who take part in wellness programs that include screenings for blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index.

But the programs are under fire from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which filed suit against Honeywell International in October charging that the company's wellness program isn't voluntary and thus violates federal law.

It's the third lawsuit the EEOC has filed this year taking aim at wellness programs. The lawsuits highlight the lack of clarity in the standards these programs must meet in order to comply with both the Affordable Care Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Honeywell, based in Morristown, N.J., got a reprieve in November, when a federal district court judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the company from proceeding with its wellness program incentives in 2015.

But the issue is far from resolved. The EEOC is continuing its investigations, and business leaders are criticizing those actions. The Business Roundtable expressed "strong disappointment" in a letter to administration officials.

"The EEOC has chosen litigation over regulation," says J.D. Piro, a senior vice president at Aon Hewitt, who leads the benefits consultant's health law group.

In the Honeywell wellness program, employees and their spouses are asked to get blood drawn to test their cholesterol, glucose and nicotine use, and also have their body mass index and blood pressure measured. An employee who refuses is subject to a $500 surcharge on health insurance premiums and could lose up to $1,500 in Honeywell contributions to a health savings account. A worker and spouse are also each subject to a $1,000 tobacco surcharge if they refuse to do the screening. That means a couple could face a combined $4,000 in financial penalties.

"Under the [Americans with Disabilities Act], medical testing of this nature has to be voluntary," the EEOC said in a news release announcing its request for a restraining order. "The employer cannot require it or penalize employees who decide not to go through with it."

On December 03 2014 07:52 Mohdoo wrote:


It's pure statistics. If the same statistic was true for blacks, I'd also support it. Racism sensitivity be damned. Ethnic/cultural sensitivity has no place in science/health.

On December 02 2014 00:42 Danglars wrote:
You don't have to strawman your opposition by suggesting that all of them think only of good workers and think nothing of wholesome people. It's just as much hyperbole by coloring the debate that way. Can your 8th graders read and write at an 8th grade level? Not so they can be merry little capable workers (eerily reminiscent of old Communist propaganda), but so they can continue to have academic success in English in high school and know that they're not slipping behind. This applies to purely informational standardized testing administrated periodically. Are the minimums being met? Are you graduating people with the basics of what used to be known in the US as the 3 R's? These are useful questions particularly in my interest area of the circa 1-4% of teachers that get the label "grossly ineffective," but are essentially unable to be fired.

On December 02 2014 14:18 Danglars wrote:
Reality: Parent's support of common core dropped 18% in one year (Rasmussen)
New York was one of the early adopters of the program. It's African American students in third grade that scored "below standard" in English has grown from 15.5% to 50%. In seventh grade, the same underachiever grouping grew from 16.5% to 70%.

(But I'm sure this is just consequences of a change, and not anything about the program itself ... of course)

If we were to evaluate its effects thus far, it would not receive a passing grade. We can argue pedagogy all day long. This particular conception of it appears to be idiotic, no need to bend reality to suit needs. The math portion is frequently put into concrete visual representations, yours and my anathema. Forced compliance from state-down forces the selection of these books and these styles, and parent's can't help with their kid's frustrations (most famously, Louis CK's) and it breeds and festers.

WASHINGTON -- Congress may use must-pass legislation in the next two weeks to slip through a controversial land deal that would help a company that jointly owns a uranium mine with Iran, sources told HuffPost.

The company, the international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, has been trying for nearly a decade to acquire 2,400 acres of the federally protected Tonto National Forest in southeast Arizona -- land that sits atop a massive copper deposit.

Under legislation offered in the House and Senate, the company's subsidiary, Resolution Copper -- which Rio Tinto co-owns with another international mining giant, BHP Billiton -- would get land originally set aside during the Eisenhower administration to conserve the environment and protect sacred Native American sites.

The deal foundered in the mid-2000s when then-Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who was convicted in 2013 on charges of conspiracy, racketeering and a number of other felonies, tried to use it to score his own real estate windfall. It has since run into opposition from Native Americans, conservationists and people concerned about the company's ties to Iran.

The Iran link comes from Rio Tinto's Rossing uranium mine in Namibia, in which Tehran owns a 15 percent stake. That connection hasn't bothered many members of Congress, but the linkage has become more important in recent years as legislators have ratcheted up their rhetoric against Iran and called for even tighter sanctions to stop the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear power.

But Rio Tinto and Resolution Copper have spent millions lobbying Congress and donating to lawmakers, according to data from federal election records and the Center for Responsive Politics. And according to opponents of the deal, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and backers in the House are trying to attach the deal to must-pass legislation -- most likely the National Defense Authorization Act, which comes from the Armed Services Committee that McCain will chair starting in January.

On December 03 2014 10:14 IgnE wrote:


It's not a strawman at all. Common core perhaps exacerbates some of the problems modern testing and evaluation pose towards education of individuals. What most people don't realize is that "teaching to the test" is just one side of the coin. There is also the less-talked about "testing what you teach." When you test pedagogy, as oneofthem has pointed out, you corrupt the autonomy of the student. Asking for answers related to such a pedagogy, and evaluating based only on a fluency with arbitrary, invented terminology funnels problem solving down a well-defined corridor. It's one thing to pose a problem and ask for the answer. Students may even use a well-defined pedagogy to reach that answer. It's another thing to ask what the answer is AND how one is "supposed" to get there.

One of the best courses I ever took was physical chemistry in college. The instructor posed simple questions looking for simple answers, but there were often more than one way of finding those answers. Students were given a powerful set of tools, taught the relations between things, and then asked to think critically about how those tools can be used in a variety of problems. The tests were designed to evaluate understanding of the tools by asking the student to creatively apply those tools to certain discrete problems. The teaching itself wasn't aimed at hammering home one particular kind of problem over and over, and then changing out the values for that kind of problem on the test and asking the student to solve it. Many of the exam questions posed totally new problems that were solvable with the concepts taught in the curriculum, but the particular solution pattern or algorithm had never been taught explicitly in the classroom. A curriculum that emphasizes that kind of problem solving stands in stark contrast to multiple-choice tests that are based on a limited number of pedagogical devices within well-circumscribed problem types and well-defined algorithms for solving them.

While common core might have a number of interesting pedagogical tools for teaching concepts to students, and might even be better than rote memorization, it seems to me that the evaluation methods built in to the curriculum slowly extinguishes the natural creativity of the students. There is a "right" way to solve certain problems, and the self-inversion of "teaching to the test" and "testing what you teach" reinforces the point that students are to do things a certain way, and the only things that matter are those things that are being tested. After all, that is how you are evaluated. Your performance within these narrow testing protocols becomes your identity. For a democracy that relies on free, educated individuals, having graduated pupils who are able to think about problems through multiple angles, and more importantly, are able to tackle new problems, without reference to some designated problem-solving algorithm or established method, is the most important thing an educational system can provide.

...

I’m still poring through the amended complaint (embedded below), and some of the other court materials that backed it up. For now, all I can say for sure is that this bombshell new material seems to demonstrate that the collusion among VFX industry executives to fix and suppress their workers’ wages was at least as shocking and crude as anything arranged in the wage-fixing cartel led by Apple, Google, and the other Silicon Valley tech titans.

...

On December 03 2014 15:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
So anyone taking bets on whether the government shuts down again or not?

Carmen Segarra, in the spirit of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before her, is like the greengrocer who said no. Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, was fired after she refused to tone down a scathing report on conflicts of interest within Goldman Sachs. She sued the Fed over her sacking but the case was dismissed by a judge without ruling on the merits because, he said, the facts didn’t comply with the statute under which she had filed. Segarra is now appealing.

Before she left she secretly recorded her bosses and colleagues, exposing their “culture of fear” and servility when dealing with the very banks they were supposed to be regulating. The Fed is the government agency charged with overseeing the financial sector – a task it singularly failed to achieve in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. What emerges from Segarra’s tapes – released by the investigative website ProPublica – is a supine watchdog wilfully baring its gums before a known burglar so that he may go about his business unperturbed

It’s as though all the Fed employees were told to put a small sign on their desk saying “Under Capitalism Everyone is Equal Before the Law”, and Segarra took hers down. She has disrupted the game, and now everyone can peer behind the curtain; the Fed is the system, and lives within the lie.

On December 04 2014 04:12 Doublemint wrote:
I wonder why this bomb of a story does not receive more attention.



The Guardian

ThisAmericanLife.org

On December 04 2014 04:12 Doublemint wrote:
I wonder why this bomb of a story does not receive more attention.



The Guardian

ThisAmericanLife.org

A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.

The decision was reached on Wednesday after months of testimony including from the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold to restrain Mr. Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a confrontation.

[. . .]

The case exposed lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.

A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.

The decision was reached on Wednesday after months of testimony including from the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold to restrain Mr. Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a confrontation.

[. . .]

The case exposed lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.