Its Crap

Today I learned that a friend from grad school--a dedicated high school teacher--lost his job yesterday, along with about 80 other teachers, when his town voted against a tax increase.

To echo David Harvey's conclusion to his RSAnimate talk, "its crap."

We cannot sit by and accept an economy and government that increasingly stratifies wealth. As I have written before, no one earns a billion dollars (or even a million dollars) in isolation. Please endorse the sharing of wealth as a fundamental human value. Every human being on this planet should deserve a chance at food, healthcare, and education more than particular individuals deserve the right to earn billions of dollars.

RSA, Seattle, and a Video

Back from RSA, which I admit I didn't get to attend as much as I would have liked. On the grad student budget, I spent one day seeing Seattle (very cool city, reminds me of Harvard Square) and another doing the conference. I missed a few great panels, so I'll probably try to contact a few people with emails...

If you have a few minutes, Alisa Miller's recent TED talk is worth a view. This will be a great teaching tool. A few years back, a few friends and I came up with a Powerpoint to question the objectivity of empirical evidence. My portion focused on the various maps of red and blue america (some maps charting electoral votes, others calibrated to population density, etc). The various maps of the video remind us that, though a picture has a 1,000 words, it, still, doesn't tell the whole story.