Talking to Comcast Support

Now, I know that with a title like this you’d expect the author to be Steven King.

It wasn’t that bad. Sort of.

My problem occurred when I tried to add a second wireless router to my house to get better speed on the 4^th floor – a problem since the primary router and the cable modem are on the 2nd floor. I connected the two routers via an Ethernet cable (connecting them wirelessly is a bad idea) and configured the secondary router as required so it wouldn’t conflict with its primary sibling.

This all worked well for a day or so until the network speeds dropped to almost nothing. Even the Amazon Echo Dots were gasping for bandwidth. “Can’t…talk…can’t…”  Poor Alexa.

Anyway, I tried lots of things, including new equipment. But the same thing happened. Finally, I decided the problem must be with Comcast rather than in the house. But I actually had no idea why.

So I started an Xfinity chat. If you didn’t know already, Comcast likes to be called Xfinity. Not surprising since Comcast has won America’s most hated company award for the last  -- I don’t know how many years. Ever since they began giving the award, I guess.

Changing your name is a good way to make people forget who you really are, so I can’t blame them. I mean, it worked for Whitey Bulger.

Boom Times for Barbed Wire

Introduction:  Walls, Both Physical and Emotional, Are Proliferating

Keeping migrants out of your country is hard work.

In 2015, Hungary strung up some barbed wire and called it a wall. As a result, the migrant wave was pushed back, leaving people stranded in Serbia.

Serbia had no choice but to follow with its own wall, and therefore so did Bulgaria.

Greece would build a wall through the Aegean Sea if it knew how (perhaps Donald Trump will lend his engineering expertise).

There’s a crisis out there, and the wave of would-be migrants crossing from Turkey into Europe has left the EU’s leaders in panic mode. That’s perfectly reasonable, but the problem isn’t going to go away and some serious planning for the long term has to begin soon.

We Need to Rethink Why People Are Hostile to Migrants

Opposition to migration in the EU is obviously related to the volume of migrants as well as to fears that some in a predominantly Islamic group will support terrorism. But we’ll make a serious mistake if we think these factors alone explain popular hostility to immigration.

School Reform -- Oprah in, Education Colleges Out

It’s time to completely rethink America’s effort to help children from low-income and disadvantaged communities succeed in education.

A key first step would be to eliminate the preeminent role of education school faculty – “educationists.” Some are capable and should stay involved, but viewed as a group, they’ve failed badly.

Their most recent disaster is the collapse of the Common Core. The fundamental ideas behind this effort were very good (and still are), but the project’s calamitous execution reveals deeply flawed thinking.

Education schools have attempted to deflect concerns about their history of faddishness by focusing on observable results:  i.e. “data.”

Unfortunately, the educationist emphasis on statistics has itself become a new fad, where simply getting numbers becomes the goal. This isn’t surprising, because education as a discipline has always wanted to be thought of as a “hard” science – more physics than sociology.  

In the case of the Common Core,  educationists pushed to test students on the new curriculum before teachers and students had a reasonable chance to master the material. Why? They wanted “baseline data” to more effectively compare before and after.

Only an educationist would be surprised when a wave of “failing” scores resulted in parental and school outrage. Educationists worship at the Temple of Excel and can’t see the people for the statistics.