Silly Little Country

Obama and Education

I reacted to the rather totalitarian part of Obama's speech to Congress that discussed education in a sort of terse way. It deserved a longer comment and Jacob Sullum does the job.

The collectivism implicit in this rhetoric is pretty creepy. Evidently all of us have a duty to optimize our educations so we can maximize our earnings and give our country the full benefit of our talents. "Every American will need to get more than a high school diploma," Obama decrees. But why stop there? If someone with strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities majors in sociology instead of engineering, it's plain that he will not be giving his country as much value (and tax revenue) as he could. What about the potential doctor who decides to play the violin or the writer who could have been a software developer? Given Obama's premise, it's hard to see why such choices should be permitted, especially when the country is so generously subsidizing higher education.

There really should be no surprise about the creepiness - recall that his work on education in Chicago was done at the side of the extremely creepy Bill Ayers.

Labels: collectivism, education, Obama

posted by Alan Adamson @ 7:58 AM 0 comments

Drinking Bottled Water

This is an amusing report from Statistics Canada.

Overall, almost 3 in 10 Canadian households used bottled water as their main source of drinking water in the home in 2006.

I am befuddled at the 3.

In general, households with a higher income were more likely to drink bottled water. While about one-quarter of households with a household income of $40,000 or less drank bottled water in the home, the proportion rose to one-third among households with an income over $91,000.

Amazing!

Whereas about one-third of households with some postsecondary education drank bottled water, only one-quarter of university-educated households reached for bottled water, the lowest proportion of any education group.

It is still a puzzling 2.5 in 10!

In contrast, seniors showed a strong preference for tap water. In fact, they were the least likely to drink bottled water, with only 17% reporting they drank primarily bottled water in the home.

Aha, that explains me.

Or, as David Zetland puts it,

Bottom Line: Bottled water customers are rich enough to afford it (and dumb enough to choose it). Hmmm...

Labels: bottled water, education

posted by Alan Adamson @ 10:25 AM 0 comments