Give all the teachers a 40% raise

That's what an op ed in Tuesday's Wall St Journal calls for.  The writer seems to feel that teachers ought to get paid more, to bring their salaries in line with say civil engineers.  OK, nice thought and all.  But.
   I'm still a believer in capitalist free market theory.  You pay enough to attract the people you need, and no more.  The modest wages paid to teachers are a signal to young people that we have a goodly supply of teachers and you could do better and make more money in other lines of work.  That's what the market is supposed to do, issue price signals to workers and suppliers, when there is a shortage of something, be it Hershey bars or school teachers, the price goes up, more people take up teaching, or candy companies make more candy bars.  It's a system that has served us well, allocated labor and capital intelligently, and given us fantastic prosperity.  The Soviets tried to operate without the market and they only lasted 70 years. 
   The same op ed did note that teachers of math and science, who are always in short supply, get paid more than the average teacher.  Hint to aspiring teachers, do a math or science major in college rather than the ed major.
   I guess my other problem with the mare 'em more idea is that we have poured more and more money into public schools.  The vast funding increase has not improved our children's education, at least by objective measures like test scores.  They have remained flat over the decades while school funding has doubled. 

Why was Prince Harry wearing a black uniform?

I thought Harry had served in the British Army, you know, the Redcoats.  He was wearing a black uniform, with his pilot's wings and some ribbons, at his wedding yesterday.  

Hair Products popular with Black Women may contain harmful chemicals

Thus saith UnScientific American on their website.  They go on at some length, listing a whole bunch of organic chemicals that I am unfamiliar with.  I never took organic chem.  On the other hand, they failed to mention, anywhere, ever, just HOW MUCH of these allegedly harmful chemicals were present in the hair products.  Modern chemical analysis is so sensitive that it can detect small amounts of anything, just about anywhere.  The article failed to let us readers know if these harmful chemicals  were present in just tiny trace amounts, or in amounts large enough to matter.  

The Economics Profession ain't diverse enough

Thus saith The Economist.  They been running the occasional think piece about economics.  This week they ran the last of the series.  And all they had to talk about was the lack of diversity, women and blacks, in economics faculties.  It's a worthy thought, I think.
   But I'm more interested in whether economics as a "science" gets it right or not.  Actually I consider economics as much as an art as a science, sorta like history.  In fact economics could call itself economic history.  Since you cannot run experiments in economics, at least not on the scale of a national economy, the people object, the best economists can do is gather observations,  like they do in geology and astronomy.  So although economists use a lot of mathematics ('cause a page of equations looks so cool in a paper) it isn't really a full science like physics and chemistry.  It's scientific, sometimes.
   But the real question is do the economists really know what they are doing? 

Eradicating Polio

  A piece on NHPR the other morning talked about eradicating polio in Pakistan.  The Pakistani's mounted a massive vaccination campaign, thousands of workers, going every where, and vaccinating every child they found.  The case rate dropped from several hundred polio cases a year down to this year, just one case so far. 
   Trouble is, the vaccination program is encountering Pakistani parents who refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated. The one polio case this year was a child whose parents refused vaccination, several times.  Vaccination program workers are reporting resistance and threats of violence. 
   I gotta wonder about a culture so poisonous that it prefers to see their young children die of a horrible disease rather than give them a life saving vaccine.  I remember back when the polio vaccine was first invented.  They set up tables outside in the Saxonville School yard, and in one day, they vaccinated every single kid in Saxonville including me.  Parents supported it 100%.
    

Driving back from DC.

It took me 11 and 1/2 hours this time, from DC motel to Mac's Market in Franconia.  It was pouring down rain in DC when I left at 7 AM.  It was heavy enough to create that road fog, a mix of falling rain, real fog, and spray thrown up by tires, that hangs over the roadway obscuring vision.  It was so thick I could not see an unlighted vehicle at all, and even the lighted ones were hard to see until I was right on their rear bumper.  The rain lightened up by the time I got to Delaware, and was pretty much dry at New York.  The sun was out by the time I reached Vermont.
   Pretty much every thing moving up and down the East Coast has to get thru, or get to, New York.  I tried the George Washington bridge this time, right around 12 noon.  A mistake, traffic is terrible, long periods of just plain stuck in traffic.   I think Tappan Zee bridge is a better deal.  They have the new Tappan Zee span open to traffic, and they are taking the old span down.
   The other touchy spot is Philadelphia, the last break in I95.  Coming up from the south on I95 in Delaware, you want to take the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  Don't follow the I95 signs to Philadelphia, you will get dumped off on city streets in North Philadelphia, or pushed onto I295 going the wrong way.  Looks like they never will finish I95 thru Philadelphia.   Stick with the Jersey Turnpike. 
   

Win 10 makes posting photos a pain

Used to be, back in the last decent Windows, Windows XP, you could hit photo upload in say Facebook, and you would get a set of snapshots of each photo in the directory.  Which made it pretty easy to click the photo you wanted to post.   Not too shabby.
  Well, the Micro$ofties managed to break that in Win 10.   Aren't we glad that Micro$oft has such a large programming staff with time to break stuff.  In Win 10 all you get is a bunch of  faceless icons, all alike, and you have to guess which one is the one you want to post.
Good Work Micro$ofties.