You know that joke "I could do that if I wanted to, I just don't want to"
I couldn't do that. Especially not while dancing around like that.
I couldn't do that. Especially not while dancing around like that.
Honestly though? This post is fuckin true. There's a six figure market for just going door to door with a snowblower in winter and a lawnmower in summer.
One of my goals with my son has been to try to listen to different music from around the world and throughout time. If you just start immediately after the class of the Roman empire with Gregorian chanting then you might assume that there's a nice linear progression from monotone to polyphony to early classical, but stuff like Sumerian hymns and ancient Greek hymns are much more complex, and that's just the stuff that was written down. It's really true history isn't written by the winners but by those who write it down and maintain those writings.
There are universal human values, but it's not what these people think they are.
There have been societies that we would think are objectively terrible throughout history. The Assyrians bragged about forcing someone to grind the bones of his wife and children before being executed himself. And people might think "but where's the universal human values in that?" But it's built right into the sentence. The Assyrians did this to the outgroup, because humans are tribal. They forced this guy to grind the bones of his wife and children because family is universally important. And then they killed him because staying alive is universally important.
The problem is with those basic human values that are built into us by genetics, you can take those as a start and then start driving in different directions and end up with something completely different. Sun Tzu said there were 5 notes and from those 5 notes you could create infinite melodies, and 5 basic elements of strategy and from those you could produce an infinite variety of strategies. In an even more correct way, you can start with a few fundamental human values and drive them into an infinite number of systems of ethics, and they can all look completely different.
There have been societies that we would think are objectively terrible throughout history. The Assyrians bragged about forcing someone to grind the bones of his wife and children before being executed himself. And people might think "but where's the universal human values in that?" But it's built right into the sentence. The Assyrians did this to the outgroup, because humans are tribal. They forced this guy to grind the bones of his wife and children because family is universally important. And then they killed him because staying alive is universally important.
The problem is with those basic human values that are built into us by genetics, you can take those as a start and then start driving in different directions and end up with something completely different. Sun Tzu said there were 5 notes and from those 5 notes you could create infinite melodies, and 5 basic elements of strategy and from those you could produce an infinite variety of strategies. In an even more correct way, you can start with a few fundamental human values and drive them into an infinite number of systems of ethics, and they can all look completely different.
Good thing they're going to bring in all the people in Epsteins little black boo -- just kidding lol
The guys I've liked lately will never make it. Samson and five times August went hard and oh will you look at that
I could never do YouTube and streaming as a job because I'm not very charismatic or interesting. It'd be like the worst public access cable TV show but worse.
The real key is to make sure that you're actually getting what the things are worth. In the case of a lot of privatization you have the public take all the risk and spend all the money to build the thing, then you hand it out to some politically connected actor for pennies on the dollar.
Public companies potentially could be used as an alternative to taxation, but you would need a dramatically smaller government for that to work.
Public companies potentially could be used as an alternative to taxation, but you would need a dramatically smaller government for that to work.
If there was an antitrust case to be made against google, I feel like this would be the one.
I have them on gog and just started a playthrough of BG1. The fact that there's an open source port is nice.
I remember there was a book I read when I was a teenager (so back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) where you'd actually run RPG battles in the course of the book, and you could make some choices like that too.
I don't think that's what these are though. Those were actually pretty cool.
I don't think that's what these are though. Those were actually pretty cool.
[Admin Mode] Woke up to no Internet, it's back up now. No idea exactly what happened, but it was on my end.
"What does that far right BIGOT do? Build electric cars and battery plants for renewable energy? FIGURES."
I always point out that many twitter users are addicts, and as long as they get their hit of mean tweets they won't go anywhere.
Look at how many celebrities stomped around and bellowed "I'M MOVING TO MASTODON" then after a month or two their twitter account is active and their mastodon account isn't.
Reminds me of windows in the 90s. Everyone hated it, but everyone kept on using it anyway.
Look at how many celebrities stomped around and bellowed "I'M MOVING TO MASTODON" then after a month or two their twitter account is active and their mastodon account isn't.
Reminds me of windows in the 90s. Everyone hated it, but everyone kept on using it anyway.
Individual schools and therefore individual teachers need parents because both need students. Even with the wastefulness of the state, even they won't waste money on teachers who are sitting around doing nothing because there's no students.
Parents have a lot of options. They can pull their kids out of a particular school. They can move to be in a better school area. They can choose a catholic school or a private school. They can even homeschool. Teachers are not entitled to do whatever the hell they want, especially not as agents of the state. A lot of people forget that schools are state institutions and teachers are state employees who get access to people's children by government fiat.
There's a lot of reasons to exercise those options.
There are American cities where the overwhelming majority get a piece of paper saying they graduated from high school but the kids can't read, or write, or do arithmetic, or balance a budget, or do their taxes. Some people say that's because of COVID lockdowns (implemented by the state and endorsed by teachers unions), but things were looking pretty dire before COVID. It's gotten worse, but it's gone from bad to worse.
Despite the absolute failure at the one thing that the schools are supposed to be there to do in the first place, many teachers waste time promoting their pet political causes and various pathological social contagions. In other words, state actors who have people's kids by mandate of the state and paid for by taxpayer dollars are using their privileged position to indoctrinate children politically. It doesn't even matter which indoctrination it is -- neither left wing indoctrination nor right wing indoctrination are acceptable to many people under such circumstances. Teachers ought to be spending that time achieving their core mission of preparing students for the long lives ahead of them.
We're in a global economy. It isn't the postwar period where every other country on earth had bombed itself to smithereens. Take a look at what schools in societies that aren't suicidal like the west are teaching their kids, and compare it to what the supposedly enlightened west considers an acceptable standard. The level of mathematics, of science, of reading and writing, of foreign languages. It's no wonder people from many of those cultures are outcompeting westerners overwhelmingly by every metric. They're tightening up their standards and we're loosening ours.
The best teachers I ever had weren't the teachers I liked the most. Often, the teachers infuriated me, because while many of the teachers I liked the best were lax and let me coast to top marks, the best teachers I had were tough and forced me to become more prepared for what the future brings. One computer teacher was the only teacher to ever push back on my tech skills and point out if I couldn't balance those with soft skills then they were worthless. One was such a pain, she forced me to neatly show all my work so it could be understood by someone else. Guess what? That's a professional skill and a life skill as painful as learning it was. One report writing teacher forced me to throw all my bullshit English classes out the window and tighten up my writing to be concise (he says in the post that's too long didn't read). Not one of the best teachers I ever had had time to indoctrinate me into their political worldview because there isn't a lot of time and there's a lot of material to cover.
And if teachers aren't pushing my son to excel like that, then they aren't working for me and I have no use for them. I'll homeschool if I have to because it's a competitive world out there and I'm a failure if I let him fail just because it was too much work to help him succeed in life.
In total, Arizona's recent switch to a set educational stipend for children seems like a home run to me. Schools will have to compete for dollars they aren't automatically entitled to, and if the public school system can't deliver the level of service parents demand, then alternatives can be directly funded with that money instead of parents and kids being forced into a system that has no incentive to excel.
One of the biggest things I'd be concerned with is the obvious free rider problem. Money is a fungible commodity, so how do you prove that the money set aside for a hypothetical child's education is being spend on education and not on a parents own selfish desires? I think that it would be inequal not in terms of socioeconomics but in terms of the quality of the parents who are given that power. An economically poor and socially disadvantaged parent who nonetheless cares deeply for their child could spend the money on a great education, but an economically rich and socially privileged parent could take the money and piss it away on nonsense (or on something actively harmful) and the kid in the early example would get a benefit and the kid in the latter example would be harmed. Unfortunately, we have to give parents the benefit of the doubt despite that. Notwithstanding school there are good parents and bad parents and we know from the literature that the effect is so overwhelming that everyone who cares should be screaming from the rooftops for fathers to stay with mothers and to be actively engaged in early childhood development.
Parents have a lot of options. They can pull their kids out of a particular school. They can move to be in a better school area. They can choose a catholic school or a private school. They can even homeschool. Teachers are not entitled to do whatever the hell they want, especially not as agents of the state. A lot of people forget that schools are state institutions and teachers are state employees who get access to people's children by government fiat.
There's a lot of reasons to exercise those options.
There are American cities where the overwhelming majority get a piece of paper saying they graduated from high school but the kids can't read, or write, or do arithmetic, or balance a budget, or do their taxes. Some people say that's because of COVID lockdowns (implemented by the state and endorsed by teachers unions), but things were looking pretty dire before COVID. It's gotten worse, but it's gone from bad to worse.
Despite the absolute failure at the one thing that the schools are supposed to be there to do in the first place, many teachers waste time promoting their pet political causes and various pathological social contagions. In other words, state actors who have people's kids by mandate of the state and paid for by taxpayer dollars are using their privileged position to indoctrinate children politically. It doesn't even matter which indoctrination it is -- neither left wing indoctrination nor right wing indoctrination are acceptable to many people under such circumstances. Teachers ought to be spending that time achieving their core mission of preparing students for the long lives ahead of them.
We're in a global economy. It isn't the postwar period where every other country on earth had bombed itself to smithereens. Take a look at what schools in societies that aren't suicidal like the west are teaching their kids, and compare it to what the supposedly enlightened west considers an acceptable standard. The level of mathematics, of science, of reading and writing, of foreign languages. It's no wonder people from many of those cultures are outcompeting westerners overwhelmingly by every metric. They're tightening up their standards and we're loosening ours.
The best teachers I ever had weren't the teachers I liked the most. Often, the teachers infuriated me, because while many of the teachers I liked the best were lax and let me coast to top marks, the best teachers I had were tough and forced me to become more prepared for what the future brings. One computer teacher was the only teacher to ever push back on my tech skills and point out if I couldn't balance those with soft skills then they were worthless. One was such a pain, she forced me to neatly show all my work so it could be understood by someone else. Guess what? That's a professional skill and a life skill as painful as learning it was. One report writing teacher forced me to throw all my bullshit English classes out the window and tighten up my writing to be concise (he says in the post that's too long didn't read). Not one of the best teachers I ever had had time to indoctrinate me into their political worldview because there isn't a lot of time and there's a lot of material to cover.
And if teachers aren't pushing my son to excel like that, then they aren't working for me and I have no use for them. I'll homeschool if I have to because it's a competitive world out there and I'm a failure if I let him fail just because it was too much work to help him succeed in life.
In total, Arizona's recent switch to a set educational stipend for children seems like a home run to me. Schools will have to compete for dollars they aren't automatically entitled to, and if the public school system can't deliver the level of service parents demand, then alternatives can be directly funded with that money instead of parents and kids being forced into a system that has no incentive to excel.
One of the biggest things I'd be concerned with is the obvious free rider problem. Money is a fungible commodity, so how do you prove that the money set aside for a hypothetical child's education is being spend on education and not on a parents own selfish desires? I think that it would be inequal not in terms of socioeconomics but in terms of the quality of the parents who are given that power. An economically poor and socially disadvantaged parent who nonetheless cares deeply for their child could spend the money on a great education, but an economically rich and socially privileged parent could take the money and piss it away on nonsense (or on something actively harmful) and the kid in the early example would get a benefit and the kid in the latter example would be harmed. Unfortunately, we have to give parents the benefit of the doubt despite that. Notwithstanding school there are good parents and bad parents and we know from the literature that the effect is so overwhelming that everyone who cares should be screaming from the rooftops for fathers to stay with mothers and to be actively engaged in early childhood development.