In Canada each province has a fairly strong teacher union. In Manitoba for example a teacher with 10 years experience will earn approximately $95K CAD (more than most software developers here). This with strong pension benefits that can be collected at 55. I know teachers that retired in their late 50s, and will continuing making 70% of their inflation adjust salaries until they die.
Relatively speaking this salary/benefits has higher expected lifetime earnings than a software developer.
One negative is that the unions are also strong enough that teachers can't be fired/replaced for performance (this is similar to Police...etc). As with any profession the worst of the bunch is very bad, and unfortunately they keep doing it until their fifties at the cost of the children.
It varies significantly by state. Five states explicitly outlaw collective bargaining by teachers and 32 states require it with various limitations on the scope of items that can be negotiated. Some states also have restrictions on striking.
Some of the worst educational outcomes in the US are in deep blue states and deep blue cities. Meanwhile, suburban communities in the US tend to vote more "red" and are also the places people go to raise families because of the better public schools.
in the USNews ranking, 8/10 of the best states Pre-K-12 are blue, while 10/10 worst are red.[1]
When you evaluate things beyond the partisan lens, poverty is a massive predictor in education outcomes which is why many deep blue cities do poorly and why many deep red states do poorly as well.
Separately, the suburbs in the US are about as purple as it gets. Suburbs also have the lowest rate of poverty compared to urban and rural. [2]
Poverty is a better analysis than political lines.
Most of the best school districts are in purple districts. The worst ones are in heavily red or heavily blue districts, largely correlating with poverty.
I consistently find that people who are unhappy/unsuccessful and also identify as "smart" are generally very good at rationalizing why things don't work out for them in a manner that protects their ego.
I think those two can ironically often go hand-in-hand.
You over value your self-importance which gives you ego/arrogance. Yet at the same time that self-importance with self-criticism leads to low self-esteem.
I think this is something that I often demonstrate. I feel the need to prove that I'm smart (ego), and I have very high standards for myself (low self-esteem, but it's getting better).
I'm not necessarily saying this is you, just that those two traits aren't mutually exclusive.
Been using ahrefs for years, not sure what is sleazy about it.
It audits your site for issues, shows Google rankings for keywords, estimated volume for keywords, backlinks to specific sites, backlinks to specific pages...etc.
It doesn't do anything for SEO (no content, no links...etc), it simply reports on the state of affairs.
SEO itself is sleazy. Any gaming of search is sleazy, whether active or passive. The NSA is sleazy, even though they simply report on "the state of affairs".
Hi, I have a small SEO consultancy. We work with tech companies (mostly B2B saas), many you’ve heard of.
You’re right that some approaches to SEO are sleazy. They are a bit old fashioned at this point, and usually result in short term results which crash and burn. Google does actually care if users don’t find a good result; they are working on improving the results every day.
But you’re wrong in the sense that SEO done correctly is just a good way to get in front of potential customers who are actively searching for information by proving value to them up front.
Let’s say you run a company and I tell you customers are searching for your product 1000 times a day. What are you going to do? Not invest in SEO?
So, to demystify it, here’s what we do:
1. Identify topics that people are searching for, prioritize by search volume and conversion potential
2. Create content which is going to best satisfy that person’s search intent. We don’t want them clicking the back button and choosing another result, that would hurt our rankings in the long run
3. Try and link to the new content from other pages on our own site
4. Identify any technical issues which would prevent a search engine crawler from being able to access or understand our content
There's another side to the coin that I think you're, understandably, overlooking. I don't think either side alone is the full story. It's a big grey ball of tradeoffs, no matter how it all falls.
Even with just your own description of your activities you can find perverse incentives and negative externalities.
You aren't exactly incentivized to just create content that satisfies common queries. More fully, you're incentivized to create content that makes people think (rightly or wrongly) their query is being answered while also marketing your goods/services to them as much as possible.
Even assuming the best intentions to actually answer the query - be it altruism, discerning searchers, fear of Google, or something else - the content itself is hardly unbiased. This isn't inherently some kind of moral failure on your part, but it's hardly negligible either for the searcher. Everybody is going to have different thresholds here for what crosses the line, but I think it's understandable that some people are just unhappy having to even put in the time and energy to disentangle this aspect in the first place.
And this dovetails into one of the obvious externalities. Who is doing SEO, and who isn't? That totally unaffiliated small-time blogger that just happened to write up a bit of info after having the same problem as you probably isn't doing a whole lot of SEO. At least, they aren't hiring you to help increase their hosting costs. Somebody trying to find less biased views ends up having to wade through all the sites making enough money to pay for SEO first, to actually find what they're looking for. It should be pretty obvious why that does no favors for SEO's reputation.
But as I said at the beginning, you're not wrong either. This stuff goes deep into 'small' questions like profit-motives and competition for limited resources. Obviously and trivially correct answers aren't here.
I really do appreciate that you're approaching this from the much better intentioned side of things. One of the few things that might be obviously correct is that your approach is better than the sleezy way.
But that doesn't make it all rainbows and sunshine either.
I think you can find exceptions in any discussion, but that's not exactly helpful.
Here's the thing: If I don't answer the user's query accurately, another website will. Then they will get all the traffic. So my long term incentive is to satisfy the query.
Within that there is a certain tolerance and understanding among search users that websites can't publish information for free. See Wikipedia constantly begging for money.
So companies (my clients) can justifiably get away with a small amount of self promotion. But if you take that too far you'll just get punished in the SERPs too.
I get this sentiment. "SEO" is basically an euphemism for spamming at this point. It's no longer just "Let's repeat this keyword 3 times" but "let's add 120 footer links and spam 35 blog comment sections per day"
I don’t think it’s how it works because I see that crap daily in footers, especially in the travel industry. Open any hotel listing on TripAdvisor and count the “[something] in [location]” links in the footer.
How do you think Google knows which pages are helpful when someone searches for “[something] in [location]”? Anchor text in links plays a key role, but with search listings on sites like TripAdvisor, it’s tricky to naturally insert those links into content. Footer links is one way to do it.
I’d agree With you if those links were misleading, but they usually aren’t. They really do point to pages with “[something] in [location]”. And they really are helpful for search engines looking to give useful results for that type of query.
Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info.
It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid.
The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean page, as the newspaper used to.
Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in <second to check on foul trouble.
That is very neat, and great use of a low bandwidth style site. On the other hand at the NBA games I’ve been to they have the box score on the jumbotron.
true, but usually only for players currently on the court and who knows what direction you'll have to rubberneck to read it. This is one instance where I like mixing the small mobile screen w my real world view, it's an augmented reality!
I've made CBS Sports my go to for scores. It loads quickly (for me at least), it's easy to read. They provide betting lines right up until game start (if you are into that) and even tell you what network is broadcasting the game, including competitors.
Many of these bikes are not a great compromise at all, they are just all together bad.
A "dual suspension bikes" for $200, will be both bad on a trail, and on a road. It will have terrible rims, terrible tires, terrible everything, and will be designed to break near-immediately. All sizzle, no steak.
Walmart could have a bike for the same price with simpler, less flashy features, that was better in everyway. Except it wouldn't pretend to be a capable full squish bike.
IF walmart was to put their heft behind a rock solid single speed it would be be an exceptional win for consumers.
The thing is people are often not all that clued up on 'the tech jargon' and so would be unlikely to purchase a single speed, non-suspension plain jane bike when right next to it (for the same or similar price) is something that has (fake) suspension, shoddy gears etc but loudly proclaims 24 Speed, Comfort Suspension etc.
I mean caveat emptor but when manufacturers stoop to such deceptive practices as fake/non-functional suspension pieces then you can't always blame the purchaser*
(* not that you were btw - just a seperate train of thought).
I don't mean compromising between different use cases, I mean compromising on budget. Different people have different needs. Many people are okay with terrible rims, tires, etc, because they're not expecting to use the bike much. A bike that lasts 90 hours may sound like crap to you, but that's enough for a twenty minute round trip every weekday for a year, which for many people could be perfectly adequate.
The claim that something can be made higher quality for the same price seems highly dubious. Cheap bike makers are throwing on these flashy features instead of making something high quality because it is cheaper to do so. I'm sure walmart would love to sell a bike for the same price that more people wanted, or at least something people liked enough to repurchase. The fact is people looking for high quality bikes aren't looking at walmart, or at the very least would look at reviews prior to their purchase. Those who don't know what they are buying generally don't really care what they are buying - and there's nothing wrong with that.
