The answer is, not much — to him, anyway — which is why I passively sit at the supper table, listening sympathetically. A basic computer technology literacy course is required for all Utah students to graduate from high school.
He knows the game as well as I. You do what you must to get the degree so you can move on to college.

What you might want to do, however, is tell state leaders a thing or two. For example, it’s time to rethink education. Rather than cling to a system that rewards youngsters for simply keeping their rear ends in a seat over a particular length of time, perhaps it’s time to create a system that rewards, and recognizes, learning. Move kids on when they are ready, not when enough bells have rung.

A few months ago I wrote about an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jal Mehta, who published a paper outlining some radical proposals for reforming public education. Among other things, he said schools in the United States are “frozen in time.” They still plod through textbooks and curricula while, outside school walls, learning has never been so exciting. Google is creating a vast digital archive. The Khan Academy provides a vast array of easy-to-understand online videos teaching a variety of topics, and other web sites and private companies are creating free access to lectures by prominent professors.

Why, Mehta asked, can’t kids pursue their natural interests with adult supervision? Why not move away from committees that certify what children should read and learn?

His is not the only such voice. Awhile back I wrote about The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. I met with former Reagan administration Labor Secretary William E. Brock, who is a member of this commission. Among other things, he was proposing a plan that would dissolve all school districts and have states administer education through one board.
Every school would be operated by independent contractors and would be monitored for performance. A state board of examination would monitor curriculum and graduate kids when they were ready.

These are only some ideas, but they deserve serious consideration as Utah struggles to increase the academic performance of its many school-age residents. Unfortunately, I have yet to hear anything so radical coming from people who actually have authority.

And so, I keep listening to my son as he comes home each day and tells me what he has been forced to endure that day.

Yes, district officials have explained to me that students can take a test allowing them to bypass this course. But it costs money (I was told the fee is about $50), and it comes with a risk. The test may be tougher than the course. If my son drops out now and fails the test, he can’t graduate with his class.

I also know he should have taken the course earlier in his high school experience, or have taken the course online. But shame on him, he was too busy learning more advanced things that interested him.

I’m sure the legislative chambers and state school board halls that created these requirements were filled with good intentions. All Utah students should be computer literate. The course includes a unit on Internet ethics, which is sorely needed.

By all means, arm students with these skills. Just realize that a delivery system that insults both learning and a student’s time won’t help Utahns compete in an ever-changing world. It will, however, teach them lessons about bureaucracy.

revenue (read the report here). You can look up your own state. In Utah, 26.7 percent comes from property taxes, while 37.5 percent comes from sales tax and 25.3 percent from personal income taxes.

Also, governments in the United States today rely on property taxes far less than they did a long time ago. In 1902, for instance, 82.1 percent of all government revenue came from property taxes.

Of course, income taxes were still illegal then, and sales taxes didn’t really come into fashion until the Great Depression. Also, overall tax burdens were much less back then.

There are a couple of ways to look at these figures. One is from government’s point of view. Only policy wonks and politicians want to do this, but it’s an important view to consider.

Governments are wise to have a tax structure that comes close to pulling equally from all three tax types. It’s like a stool with three legs. You lose stability if the legs aren’t equal.

If a state relies too much on sales taxes, for instance, a recession can be devastating. People just don’t buy as much when the economy goes bad. Likewise, relying too much of property taxes can put you in trouble if the housing market goes bust.

This is why the most recent recession was so devastating. Housing went kaput and sales tax revenue dried up. And when people lost their jobs, income taxes fell, too. Poor, poor governments (everyone shed a tear, please).

A much more popular way to look at this is from the taxpayer’s point of view. People complain the loudest about property taxes. When governments try to raise them, angry mobs descend.

This is for a couple of reasons. People feel, rightly so, that their property (defined most often as their house) is sacrosanct. They resent governments implying they can take that property away by force (although this seldom happens until taxes are several years in arrears).

But the biggest reason is that property taxes are so visible. You get a bill at the end of each year telling you how much you owe. There is something stark and raw about that.

There also is something transparent and accountable about it.

Income taxes produce similar feelings, but under the current system Americans seem too engrossed in the game of finding deductions and reducing their taxable income to get too upset. They rejoice over a large tax refund check, seldom stopping to think that the government has held that money — their money — interest free for most of a year.

If people didn’t have to pay sales taxes a little at a time, if cash registers just kept a notation of what you owed and forwarded it to a giant database, and if you got a bill at the end of the year for the total you owed, I’m guessing we’d be assembling mobs that compete with the property tax mobs.

As it is, we tend to forget about sales tax. That’s good for government, but not necessarily for you.

forbidding smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes to smoke. They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately; though sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to make new laws that the old laws should be enforced — and then forget both new and old. Wherever enforcement threatened money or votes — or wherever it was too much to bother — it became a joke. Influence was the law.”

File this under, “The more things change …”

Other than being amazed that someone would try to regulate speed in 1915, the quote could have been written yesterday.

While I think it’s much harder for influence to trump enforcement in this age of cell phone videos, that doesn’t stop some from trying.

But the part about forgetting laws that are passed made me reflect back to a major story I once covered as a City Hall reporter. Almost exactly 22 years ago, Jan. 18, 1991, three people died during an AC/DC concert at the old Salt Palace arena in Salt Lake City. They died because fans had been allowed to purchase tickets for the floor of the arena, on which there were no seats. This “festival seating” arrangement allowed fans to roam freely. Unfortunately, it also allowed the crowd to surge when AC/DC came onstage, and people toward the front were trampled.

Shortly afterward, as the story raged on the national stage, a city councilman urged an ordinance to outlaw festival seating. That was when I responded to a tip, did some research and found that Salt Lake City already had outlawed festival seating in 1982 after 11 people had died entering a concert in far-away Cincinnati.

Quite literally, everyone had forgotten the ordinance was on the books. Salt Palace management had changed. So had the politicians and staff at City Hall. They hadn’t forgotten immediately, as in Tarkington’s fictitious city, but my research showed festival seating had begun again in Salt Lake in 1988.

Tragedies or economic crises sometimes prompt politicians, in a fever to appear doing something (an outward sign of leadership), to pass laws that do little more than place exclamation points on already existing laws.

The recession of 2008, for instance, prompted calls to tighten the regulation of financial institutions. Some of this was needed, but lost in all the commotion was the fact that many regulations already were in place but that regulators had become too lax or too chummy with those they were regulating. Does anybody believe the same thing won’t happen again after awhile, given similar circumstances (“awhile” may mean many decades)?

This is not meant to diminish the real legislative work that will go on in every state and in Washington this year. It’s just a reminder that some legislative solutions, just as some “message” bills, are more for a lawmaker’s resume than anything else. And also that even good legislation struggles to change human nature.

And where on earth does Disneyland really rank in all this?

I’m being facetious about this, of course. Not because it makes me happy, but to illustrate a point. People who try to measure happiness might as well try nailing Jell-O to the wall.

Legatum uses 89 indicators in eight categories to measure how happy people are. The idea is to look beyond things such as personal income (although that is a factor) and toward a variety of issues that make people feel good. Americans were docked for their high unemployment rate and their perceptions of job markets.

The happiest country? It’s Norway. Being of Norwegian descent, this makes me happy, somewhat. But a big key to Norway’s success in the poll seems to be its huge cache of off-shore oil, which helps finance its welfare state — not exactly something to which other nations can aspire.

But frankly, if you have to measure 89 indicators, aren’t you overthinking things a bit?

Gallup also tries its hand in measuring happiness, but with a simpler, direct method. Last month it released results of a poll in which about 1,000 people were contacted in each country and asked about their previous day. How often had they smiled or laughed? Did they feel respected? Did they learn new things or accomplish something of interest?

According to this measure, seven of the 10 happiest places on earth are in Latin America. Some of these happy places have high poverty rates. One, Venezuela, often makes news because of its increasingly oppressive government, and yet it ranked fourth. The United States came in 33rd.

Despite obvious flaws, there is something instructive here.

Any survey that delves into happiness is bound get a lot of things wrong. No metric can explain how someone can smile or find balance and perspective amid tragedy and despair, or how someone else can be surrounded by all the good things of the world and yet wallow in gloom.

Circumstances aren’t necessarily good indicators. I have a son who recently returned from two years in Mexico on a church mission. He not only described very happy people living in what Americans would consider a condition close to complete lawlessness and chaos, he himself was quite happy and reluctant to come home.

Service and generosity, it seems, can count more than scores of other indicators. Critics of the Gallup poll say Latin Americans may be culturally disposed to giving positive answers to strangers. But couldn’t the critics have it exactly backwards. Couldn’t treating other people nicely make a person happy?

Despite all the measurements, the best final word on this subject may have come from a New York state senator, Roy M. Goodman. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination.”

That’s a comforting thought. It means you can be quite happy even if the Environmental Protection Agency says your home is in the region with the nation’s worst air pollution in January (as my Salt Lake City home was). It means happiness doesn’t depend on circumstances as much as on you and what you choose to do. It means if you’re trying to achieve it, you’re missing the point.

learned is that the age-old tug-of-war between being first with the story and nailing down the facts has entered hyper-drive in the digital age.

For you, the news consumer, there are lessons, as well. One of them is that the line between consumer and journalist is becoming as blurry as a horizon in a snowstorm, and skepticism is a good reading lamp to have handy.

The New York Times this week highlighted one aspect of the Te’o’ story. ESPN apparently was close to breaking it first but decided to wait until it could get an interview with Te’o’ himself. Meanwhile, the website Deadspin came in and got the scoop.

Caution can cost the race. This aspect of the story is actually comforting, however. Deadspin apparently had confirmed the story without the need to talk to Te’o’. Such an interview easily could be a next-day story. ESPN, meanwhile, can comfort itself by knowing there are worse sins than not publishing for fear of being wrong.

The troubling aspect of it all actually goes much farther back. It involves how so many media outlets were in love with the idea of an inspirational dying girlfriend and a football star that they perpetuated the hoax without bothering to check some obvious details.

I pause here to note a high degree of personal hesitation in lapsing into any sense of personal outrage. One cannot spend 30 years in the news business without collecting an unwritten resume of errors and regrets. Every criticism begins to look a lot like a boomerang.

It’s worth noting, however, that both the pressure to be first and the complete collapse of credibility never have been more slippery cousins toward the cliffs of ruin than they are today.

I know a thing or two about breaking sensational stories. One of my most memorable experiences took place 29 years ago when the phone rang while I was the lone nighttime reporter in a Las Vegas newsroom. Earlier that day, an actor by the name of John-Erik Hexum had died as the result of an accident on the set of a television show called “Cover Up.” The actor’s family had arranged to have his organs harvested for transplanting.

The story had meant nothing to me personally, but that changed when the man on the other end of the phone said he knew who had received Hexum’s heart. It was the owner of a Las Vegas escort service. I spent the rest of that night pursuing the lead, finally and triumphantly convincing a hospital official to confirm it to me near midnight (this was an age before privacy laws). I had it first, and the horde soon followed.

I’ve often wondered how that would have played out today. Would the person who called me even have bothered, or would he have tweeted the news himself? What about any of the other people I spoke to along the way? Would blogs and Facebook statuses have forced my hand before I was ready? More importantly, would I or my colleagues have run with a good story that was broken elsewhere without completely vetting the facts?

I’ll be the first to admit today that the Hexum story was of dubious merit. It flashed and faded. Today no one remembers who got it first, even if by chance they remember the incident at all. 

Being first has its immediate, but short-lived, rewards. Being first and wrong, however, can last a long time, indeed.

And breathing life into a fictional girlfriend because it makes for a great story can leave a long and messy exhaust trail of mistrust in its wake.

For the public, the good news is the truth eventually comes out. But in an age when information moves at light speed, it shouldn’t take that long.

build support for tougher gun laws.Forget the implication that suddenly, after four years in control of the White House and despite controlling the House, Senate and White House from 2009-2011, liberals would now decide the most important thing to do is to stage an elaborate plot to stage a mass murder. The folks behind this conspiracy theory must never have lived in a small town. It’s not like in a big-city apartment complex. People know each other. You can’t bring strangers into town, have their children inhabit your schools and then have them pull off a pretend national story of this magnitude without having a lot of people get suspicious.

And if you’re really into conspiracies and believe the media was all in on it, that would have to include small town papers, as well. I’ve worked for a lot of news organizations. People in this business tend to crawl over each other for a scoop, especially when it involves something that’s getting a lot of attention.

But back to our two young college students on the train. They intrigued me because they seem to represent a broad cross-section of the country that is packing gun shows and making a lot of gun sellers happy these days.

And they don’t seem to have a clue.

So much of how people understand the world is through second-hand perceptions and stereotypes. The toughest of Obama's proposals announced this week would outlaw assault-type weapons and limit ammunition clips. But if you know anything about politics, you know those things are not likely to appear in a law book near you any time soon.

Republicans control the House, and they tend to represent people who don’t think lax guns laws are a problem. Even some Democrats represents people like that.

Beyond that, Obama expressed his own support for the Second Amendment, and he was careful not to limit that to the right to hunt. He talked about guns for protection. He spoke about rights coming with responsibilities.

I personally don’t think an assault weapons ban would accomplish much. The pro-gun crowd has some slogans that are trite and worn, but the one that says when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns is true. I’ve never heard a credible argument against it.

That said, however, the United States is not about to rewrite the Second Amendment. My college-aged train passengers can relax.

It is, in the words of the authors, a way to prove Adam Smith’s theory, first published in 1776, that “When institutions protect the liberty of individuals, greater prosperity results for all.”

But even if you’re not steeped in economic theory, this year’s index ought to be a wakeup call. If you don’t see the connection between economic freedom and overall freedom, you haven’t checked out the list. Areas like Hong Kong, Australia and Denmark make up the top 10. The bottom has the likes of North Korea, Cuba and Zimbabwe.

Economic freedom and political freedom are close cousins. In the food chain of political conditions, they feed off each other.

Last week’s political buffet in this country was dominated by gun control and the president’s call for a $500 million program to curb violence. This came just after the House approved a $50 billion aid package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

The truth is, we can’t afford either, regardless of their importance.

And when politicians finally get back to worrying about the economy — the next fiscal cliff is coming in March, by the way — they ought to quit quibbling over taxing the rich vs. making a few cuts here and there. They need to be “reducing the size of government, overhauling the tax system, transforming costly entitlement programs and streamlining regulations.”

When I last wrote about the index, in 2008, the United States ranked fifth. But the recession had just begun and politicians, as they always do in a crisis, were scrambling to do something, anything — even if they had no idea what would help.

Since then, government has grown faster than most American waistlines, and more than 100 new major federal regulations have been fixed to business operations like heavy weights to a balloon.

This year the United States ranks 10th. It has moved into the category of “mostly free” nations, one notch down from “free.” It isn’t even first in North America. You want free? Travel to Canada, which ranked sixth this year.

In the foreword to the report, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot writes of the “fashionable theory” that “economic recoveries after financial crises are always slower and take longer than recoveries after conventional recessions.”

This, he writes, has become a “political excuse,” and it helps explain a worldwide trend toward putting governments, not individuals, at the head of economies.

Why does this matter? Two words: Global leadership. The United States risks losing credibility as an economic model for the world, which translates into a loss of influence in a variety of ways. Coupled with the economic decline of most European nations (Scandinavia is a notable exception), this is a disturbing loss of prestige for nations with a history and tradition supporting human rights and basic freedoms.

Fortunately, things can change rapidly if nations really want them to. Mauritius, despite its location in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, leaped into the Top 10 this year at No. 8. Sweden, once known for its socialist policies, has climbed to 18th, aided by tax reforms and policies that have helped the private sector while shrinking government. There is a reason why Swedish companies like IKEA and H&M now dot the Utah landscape, and their success translates into greater freedoms in the homeland.

On the other hand, the more money our government removes from the economy, whether through taxation, regulation or the hidden costs of borrowing to pay for debt, the less money there is for people pursue their own dreams.

If we remain only mostly free, and if the downward trend continues, we will have to be the home of the brave, indeed.

its mandate to buy health insurance. And yet from news reports it seems a lot of people there would be fine with a government mandate to buy a firearm, even if they’re not insured against shooting themselves in the foot.

The City Council settled instead on a resolution encouraging gun ownership and training. Think of it as the “mutually assured destruction” theory of arms control on a local level, similar to how the United States and the Soviet Union kept World War III from happening supposedly because each side had a nuclear arsenal.

Nutty? Sure, but not much more so than what is found on the other side of the spectrum, where stricter gun control is the default solution to mass murder. That cause is generally pressed without a rational peek at the history of such measures and their lack of effectiveness.

In the wake of recent tragedies, battle lines are becoming clear. The president is talking tough, threatening executive action if Congress does nothing, and gun shows last weekend reported record attendance.

People are taking sides; talking-points are replacing rational thought and debate.

And amid it all last week, a judge in Colorado presided over a preliminary hearing for James E. Holmes, accused of shooting people in a movie theater in the city of Aurora.

Among other things, prosecutors presented evidence that Holmes paused for self-portraits in the hours before his rampage. In one, he wore black contact lenses to give his eyes a sinister, lifeless look.

Perhaps it would be significant here to point out that the murder rate nationally has declined for years and now is at levels not seen since the early ‘60s.

That, of course, is no comfort to the families of victims in a movie theater, nor to the parents of precious children gunned down in their first grade class.

And so we contemplate the man with the black contact lenses; we study the anti-social young man who spent hours in his room playing video games before changing Newtown, Conn., forever; we ponder the immigrant from Bosnia who attacked Trolley Square, the high school students who attacked Columbine High School and the dozens of others who have sent crippling bullets through the air without a trace of empathy.

How do we stop just those people? What kind of law can protect us from them?

Were they mentally ill? Perhaps, but some scholarly studies show mental illness is rarely a factor in homicide, and that substance abuse may be a bigger danger.

Do violence in movies and video games fuel such acts? Absolutely; no one should ignore the connection some of the killers themselves make with films and video games, and many producers seem to have an unhealthy obsession with gore.

But does this help? Do we regulate films? If gun control were the fix, Norway wouldn’t have experienced Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage. Sure, no one wants troubled minds to have easy access to high-powered weapons. But how do we stop it?

People tend to think their generation invented the problems it confronts. We forget about Anthony Churilla, who went to a convent in Highland Mills, N.Y. in November of 1932 and began shooting up from the basement at nuns walking the floor above. We don’t bother to research the sniper who terrorized Philadelphia in 1950, shooting people at random over a six-week period.

There is little comfort in remembering such things — only perspective. As we all try to snatch solutions from the wind and make them stick, it is important to know that we are dealing with something that has vexed and plagued people for generations.

If we allow these killers to divide us along mindless ideological lines, we will have misunderstood the question, and our solutions will not be answers.

Robbers tend to strike close to where they live, and they tend to strike in neighborhoods in which they feel more at home. African-American criminals were 1.98 times more likely to target African-American neighborhoods than any other. Hispanics were 3.82 times more likely to rob in an Hispanic block, and white robbers also seemed to prefer victimizing people who looked more like them.

Members of Congress, however, were found likely to victimize people nationwide. (OK, I made that one up.)

Also, the study found that robberies are more likely to occur on streets containing businesses such as bars, clubs, fast food restaurants, hair salons and barbershops, liquor stores, groceries, gas stations, laundromats, pawn shops, and check cashing places. And places where illegal drugs, prostitution and gambling are prevalent also seemed to attract crime.

I know what you’re thinking. We need academic studies to figure that out?

Well, it’s good to have data to support our notions. It helps communities allocate law-enforcement resources and make zoning decisions.

Also, you might want to reconsider when the real estate agent tells you the house you’re looking at is convenient to schools. The study found that proximity to high schools raised the chances of robbery by 1.78 times.

Again, my friends and I could have told you that 40 years ago when we were at North Phoenix High. But now we can back it with data.

(Read the study by clicking here.)

Perhaps “Meh”-Man is his name.

We all long for someone to come along and rescue us completely from the rising water, shooting all the bad guys in the process. But people can’t be too picky in an emergency.

Seriously, folks, how long can this string of dramatic cliffhangers go on?

More to the point, how long until the public either tunes it out or completely loses faith in government?

Actually, both those things may already have happened. Realclearpolitcs.com shows Congress with an 18 percent approval rating, down from a post-election “high” of 23 percent.

In the short-term, this is a fight Republicans are likely to lose.

As this CNNMoney report notes, the time will quickly come when the nation will collect less each day than it owes in bills. On Feb. 15, there will be $9 billion coming in and $52 billion to pay.

But if you think Americans will throw a fit about the need to make budget cuts that day, consider that among those bills will be an estimated $6.8 billion in IRS refunds and $2.3 billion Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Hang onto people’s tax refunds for awhile and see what kind of mood they’re in.

Without raising the debt ceiling, the government eventually would be unable to cover Social Security checks. It might have to pick and choose which bond investors it pays. The Bipartisan Policy Center calls the results of such a situation, “chaotic.”

And Sandy was a windstorm.

In the long-term, of course, this will be just another skirmish in a never-ending slide toward Greece unless politicians of all stripes get deadly serious about finding real, systemic solutions.

Extending Bush-era tax cuts to all but the wealthy wasn’t such a solution. It didn’t stop runaway growth in entitlements or fix a complicated and cumbersome tax code. It didn’t match revenues with expenditures.

Until that happens, Washington will keep dishing up cliffs, ceilings, tsunamis, hailstorms or whatever else one intends to call the frequent flash points at which two competing and equally ineffective philosophies collide.