Cephus
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2007
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Scarecrow Akhbar said:The first step to loss prevention is to get rid of the non-paying customers.
Agreed on principle, don't think it matters in actually solving the problem. Having a classroom with 40 legal and 5 illegal students costs the same as a class with 45 legal students.
Once the class sizes have been stabilized at thirty per, which is small enough if the teacher is half-way competent, then we start booting the teachers, not to mention ditching all the free-loading admin.
California has been losing students for years, most schools that were going year-round are returning to traditional schedules. However, the teacher unions don't want to lose any teachers under any circumstances, they want zero lay-offs, zero pay-cuts, even if they've got one student per classroom. You're fighting a massively powerful and very wealthy union that pretty much controls Sacramento. The biggest problem is that most of the really incompetent teachers are the ones with seniority and tenure and can't be fired for pretty much any reason unless they blatantly break the law and even then, the unions will fight it.
Cite the clause in the Constitution allowing the federal government regulation over public schools.
When has that stopped them? You don't think the federal government gives a damn, do you?
So? How much help does poison need, anyway?
The poison doesn't need help at all, it's the people who have been poisoned that might need a little aid. However, that's not the point, the point is that Schwarzenegger is using scare tactics with his potential cuts, just like he did a couple weeks ago when he said he was going to fire firefighters (right before the Santa Barbara wildfire). The unions have so much power that their members can never be laid off. Schwarzenegger signed the contract with SEIU, luckily it stalled in the legislature, that guaranteed that none of their 95,000 members could be laid off or have their pay or benefits cut for any reason.
This is how Sacramento works.
Guess what? I don't use the poison help line, so let them cut it.
That's a pretty shallow way of looking at things. I don't use the local hospital either, should we just close it? I can't tell you the last time I needed the police or the fire department. Better shut 'em down.
What drove GM into bankruptcy was it's failure to produce cars people wanted to buy.
At a price people were willing to pay and the reason they had to charge so much for their cars is the ridiculous pensions and salaries that they got roped into. I don't remember the exact figures, but something like $1000 out of the profit for every single GM car sold, maybe it's even more, is already spoken for, paying for pensions. California is even worse off, 75% of every dollar we take in is already spoken for, paying for state-employee pensions and benefits. And you know something? They all have legal contracts that cannot legally be violated just because we have no money to pay them.