Did anyone do the arithmatic??? OMG!!

[PICHARDO]

Both of you failed to grasp even the simplest bloc from the new model I explained at length before...

Students will learn at their pace and individual developmental stages. It don't matter how long the new model takes to implement nation-wide, as the students will NOT be assigned to a preset level of education based on today's used model but on an individual basis case by case.

What? Keep churning out one size-fits-all students into today's fast paced and evolutionary technologies that change on a monthly basis?

The conceptual of education you understand is based on a system that should be in a museum and not a classroom of any kind...

You can go as far as to point out what you understand to be a highly educated formative model, based on your own instruction of the same model you seek to defend against the natural evolutionary process; which we developed since our introduction in the cosmos.

Wait! We can have companies with billions of dollars at risk and God knows what critical systems in their care all over the world, maintaining a large part of their workforce doing work OVER the internet, yet the same is impossible as a supporting tool to the formation of the same workforce later to integrate to the job pool?????

This is the same debate raging centuries ago over vehicles taking over horse drawn carriages, air travel between continents over long voyages at sea by ships...

You fail to grasp that most kids exposed to recent technologies, only use a pen and paper in schools and seldom ever get to hand one, while interacting with the real world that today we live in.

Even our own signatures, long a tradition of social interconnection and commerce is nowadays replaced by digital ones more often than not.

You call it science fiction, we call it reality that today rules our world and seeks to expand into the farthest corners of the world.

No long ago a doctor sitting in his office, conducted a remote operation via assistance from computers and monitors and had a doctor that had never performed an intricate surgery in his career, do so with his trainer thousand of miles away.

The name of the DR in training was Dr. Abel Rojas, a well established Dominican practitioner and surgeon in the DR and the trainer a Dr. in the US that developed and successfully repeated the surgeries countless times, to the benefit of untold numbers of surgeons worldwide that needed the training but lacked the resources to attend them out of their countries....

We can cut delicate tissue from a man's chest, just inches from the heart, directed from thousand of miles away, but we surely CAN'T develop and roll out an educational model capable of allowing a teacher to provide lessons to kid’s miles away in the same country?

We're a little country full of uneducated and unskilled (according to your pov) people that just built the most advanced Metro line in the western Hemisphere at 1/3 the cost of any comparable one out there today or in construction, in record time deemed almost heroic and yet you still think we're too small brained and developed to roll out and design to our needs such model?

Just b/c no developed 1st world powerful nation owns or uses such model, it means ours is based on BS and would take eons to implement as you stated?

I tell you what! I'll post here in this forum the first picture of the laptops to roll out with such system, even before they're made public elsewhere in the DR's media or the outside world... So you'll see that even though we're a small poor country, we can also do things the big guys can't or won't do...

I'll do even one better: I'll let you run a test module of the new system on line as soon as it's up and running for trials. Maybe unlike the brick and mortar of the Metro rolling in the under and above grounds of SD, you'll take it for a spin and at the very least some factual knowledge before throwing rocks at it...


We're just waiting for enough of the national territory to come on line, before we roll out the new model for good in the DR...

Just this year hundreds of the most remote communities will come in line with great support from our internal communication service providers.

[NALs]

Pichardo, there is no point in attempting to make anyone here understand this. They are set in their ways and they are stubborn.

If they weren't, then they would know that the funding of education as a percentage of GDP has been on a steady increase since 2004 and that the DR spends more on education as a percentage of GDP than quite a few "rich and better educated" countries.

But, saying that on DR1 is blasphemy.

Its also blasphemy to remind everyone that the SD Metro is the cheapest metro ever built on the entire planet.

Oh well... what can anyone do?

-NALs

[ExtremeR]

Hello Hillbilly interesting article, but I think you had an error in the arithmetic you used to calculate the cost of the Metro.

The cost of the Metro was: US$700,000,000.00 which translated in Pesos at the actual rate 35.4 accounts for RD$24,780,000,000.00 not RD$243,000,000,000.00 as you stated in your first post. If we calculate RD$243,000,000,000.00 to Dollars it would be a whooping 6.86 Billions of US Dollars, very different to the first figure of 700 Millions. The DR Budget hovers around US$ 9.3 Billions at the actual exchange rate.

I think that with the facts corrected we can have another look or perspective to the whole Metro situation...

[Malibook]

Originally Posted by NALs

Pichardo, there is no point in attempting to make anyone here understand this. They are set in their ways and they are stubborn.

Oh well... what can anyone do?

-NALs

Maybe you two should get a cabana.

[Hillbilly]

$23...my bad. Oh but what is a zero among politicians....I realized I forgot that little decimal point, DUH...but at RD$24.8 billion it is still too much....
And I do not remember all that financing Mr. P is talking about...

When the two government apologists get their heads out of the clouds, we'll see the reality.

Abel Rojas is fine.

But generalize this into a universal educational system? Hardly possible. Why?

Who are going to teach? At what price? What to do with the tens of thousands nearly illiterate teachers now in the system? With what money will they be retired???ETc Etc..

Back to Metro...Hummmmm, international financing....seems to me that was what Lilis did way back when...and look what happened to him!! And worse than that, what happened to the country next...

Are we going to believe that 200,000 people a day will ride this (really just 100,000--going back and forth)...and this will PAY for it???? Damn, they are better than every other metro system in the world...And gee, I wonder how much they paid Hubieres and the other syndicate leaders to shut up???? All those old tin cans and junkers have owners and drivers...(I totally agree about how nice that ride must be for the folks in Villa Mella. And the ones in Sto Dgo that can afford it, can now go to Villa Mella and get their roast pork in a flash!)

Maybe they can pay with platano chips???

I am sorry, there are times when Pichardo is really dead on, but this seems like an apostle defending his Lord...

TIme will tell....maybe one day, from on high, I can look down and see this happening, but not in your or my lifetime...

HB

[JDJones]

Originally Posted by PICHARDO

No long ago a doctor sitting in his office, conducted a remote operation via assistance from computers and monitors and had a doctor that had never performed an intricate surgery in his career, do so with his trainer thousand of miles away.

The name of the DR in training was Dr. Abel Rojas, a well established Dominican practitioner and surgeon in the DR and the trainer a Dr. in the US that developed and successfully repeated the surgeries countless times, to the benefit of untold numbers of surgeons worldwide that needed the training but lacked the resources to attend them out of their countries....

.

It wasn't Abel Rojas, it was Dr. Abel Ricardo Gonzalez, and was one of the first operations performed at the newly opened Clinica Abel Gonzalez De Medicina Advanzada on Ave. Lincoln.

How do I know? Let's just say I was intimately involved with the operation... I was the patient.

It was also taped, and shown on the Discovery Health Channel..

I'm a STAR!!!

Now, back to the originally scheduled thread.....

[Hillbilly]

WOW!! Congrats JD....good for you...I'll try and see it when comes around...

Lots of gore..

BTW, initial reports from Metro riders are that they love it...and I can understand that...my beef is the cost, the sacrifice of other priorities, like schools and hospitals...of course Pichardo would have us believe that this will all go the way of your operation, when dozens if not hundreds of Dominican students will lose their semester because the gov't is so overdue with payments...oh come on, this is the DR...we are NOT going to have computer communities learning over the internet within the next ten years...We are NOT going to have doctors operating on patients in the campo via computers and we are certainly not going to have international airports in every province, except to receive drug shipments....

All hail to the Metro...I wonder how many of us or our readers will ever set foot on it??

[arturo]

I 'm very surprised to see people writing about what the passengers think about the Metro experience. What on God's green earth WOULD NOT be an improvement over the carro concho/voladora/guagua system? For heaven's sake, the only disadvantage to walking as an alternative is that it take too long. Of course the riders love it.

Originally Posted by Hillbilly

WOW!! Congrats JD....good for you...I'll try and see it when comes around...

Lots of gore..

BTW, initial reports from Metro riders are that they love it...and I can understand that...my beef is the cost, the sacrifice of other priorities, like schools and hospitals...of course Pichardo would have us believe that this will all go the way of your operation, when dozens if not hundreds of Dominican students will lose their semester because the gov't is so overdue with payments...oh come on, this is the DR...we are NOT going to have computer communities learning over the internet within the next ten years...We are NOT going to have doctors operating on patients in the campo via computers and we are certainly not going to have international airports in every province, except to receive drug shipments....

All hail to the Metro...I wonder how many of us or our readers will ever set foot on it??

[madera]

it seems that if 170k people a day use the metro. it should pay for itself very quickly... figure 150k dollars per day. 6 days a week. close to 50 million dollars... only cost 700...14 years or so... upkeep will kill it it will stop one day and never run again... i think there is a train in p.p. in the same way. used to work.. they have had trains here before.

[NALs]

Originally Posted by madera

it seems that if 170k people a day use the metro. it should pay for itself very quickly... figure 150k dollars per day. 6 days a week. close to 50 million dollars... only cost 700...14 years or so... upkeep will kill it it will stop one day and never run again... i think there is a train in p.p. in the same way. used to work.. they have had trains here before.

Those trains you refer to were dismantled by Trujillo. Their tracks are all over the sugarcane plantations in the eastern and southern part of the country, since that's what he used them for.

The same thing occurred in Puerto Rico. They had a functioning train until it was dismantled and its pieces used for the sugar industry.

Cars was all the rage back then, all thanks to Henry Ford.

-NALs