Education in Hong Kong

Seeing this made me look up this which led me to this:

Tutors in Hong Kong are often promoted as "stars", for their personal charisma as well as their academic qualifications. They can be seen on billboards, full-page newspaper ads and TV screens in railway stations or on buses. Some of them have their own teams of stylists, fashion designers and photographers, as well as personal Web sites.[1]The most successful of them have an annual salary of HK$10 million.

Wow.

ADDED: HK$10 million... time to cash in! Send me ten bucks, and I'll give you the name of a book that I recommended to a friend who was scoring perfect on the math section of the SAT but having trouble with the verbal section. After going through the book, she went from, if I recall correctly, somewhere in the 500's to somewhere in the 700's. I kid, I kid--no need to send money, here's the book.

I don't know what effect the book would have now. I think the test has changed considerably since my friend was in high school.

The 115th Carnival of Homeschooling...

... is up. I found this one to be particularly good.

So Racist You'd Like to Pay for People of Other Races to Have Abortions?

Planned Parenthood would be happy to help you out.

Whoa.

ADDED: Planned Parenthood calls the handling of the call "a serious mistake." Yeah, I'd call that a pretty serious mistake. Of course, if Planned Parenthood thinks that abortion is just a choice, not the ending of a life, what's their qualm? If there isn't something wrong with abortion in the first place, what do they care if someone would like to offer them especially to certain groups of people?

ADDED: In a similar vein, Swan Lake Acro-Ballet. (Via The Anchoress)

The Economics of Highly Paid Prostitution

In the wake of Spitzer's fall, Ann Althouse asks, "If it was legal, would you want to be a prostitute?"

The question is how harmful is the work — if you consider what it would be if it were legal? So thinking about whether you would want to do it — when you are not a weak or desperate person — is a decent test of whether it is so harmful that the law should be used to protect people from it. Admittedly, this is only looking at whether the prostitute is harmed by prostitution, but let's focus on that. Would you consider a career in prostitution? Assume reasonable benefits: great pay, excellent health care, a safe, well-run workplace, interesting colleagues. Would you?

Several straight men in the comments have offered hearty affirmatives, but such answers are of little value since the demand for straight male prostitutes is, I imagine, nil.

My answer: F*** no. And I imagine that most other straight women around my age would answer the same. In fact, I found the question absurd. I think that answer is obvious and not only due to the negative moral implications of prostitution. Let's look at prostitution from a purely secular perspective. Let's look at it in terms of economics. Here's what I wrote at Althouse:

Putting aside the not inconsiderable moral implications, prostitution is a bad deal economically.

Most women will, at some point, want to marry and start families. In pursuit of this, they will want to secure the most desirable mates possible.

Any advantages they have that would allow them to be highly paid prostitutes; such as youth, beauty, good conversational skills, etc.; would also be advantages in securing especially desirable mates.

Being a former prostitute, however, is likely to be an extraordinary disadvantage in securing a desirable mate as most men will find this trait highly undesirable. It may even be the case, generally, that the more desirable the mate, the more undesirable that mate will find former involvement in prostitution to be.

So for a few years of highly paid prostitution, the prostitute loses an enormous amount of market value in securing someone who may be her mate for the next fifty or more years and who will, therefore, be highly determinat[ive of] her financial, emotional, intellectual, and familial well being.

In short, don't be a ho if you don't want to marry a schmo.

Sound advice, I think.

For the Price of a MacBook Air...

... you could fly to Japan and pay $400 for a laptop that's just as thin and full of features. Plus, it's been on the market for two years already. That's what I found out when my brother came to visit yesterday and brought his new laptop with him. He's back in town for a short while.

The Best Political Ad I Have Ever Seen

Really, it is. Rarely do I see any I like at all, but I actually love this one. (Via Althouse, don't miss her thoughts on it.)

Should Be Studying

No blogging lately as I have an exam coming up in May that I need to study for in my spare time. Many good books are hanging around temptingly by my bedside, and just today this one showed up. (I read very little fiction, but the first book was so good that I had to pre-order the second.)

But back to blogging: maybe it's good to take a break from the news--especially when it's all O-llary all the time.