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Slavery checks.

Since they'll be paid for with debt future generations will have to pay off because we have no intention to.

Assuming there's a set number of education dollars, making sure everything is everywhere means you're taking dollars at crowded schools where a course is wanted and instead using them at sparsely populated schools where a course isn't particularly wanted.

That would result in the people in places where something is wanted being in worse shape, and the people in places where a course isn't particularly wanted being in far better shape artificially. Imagine if you had many departments with no students or almost no students, and a rural university being required to fully fund equally resourced versions of those programs. I imagine the rural Montana university urban planning or outreach degree programs being harder to get qualified teachers for than the University of Chicago equivalent. Meanwhile, the university of Chicago ranch management program would need to be funded like the Montana university program as well.

One real question is whether universities are appropriate for purpose anyway. Prior the WWII they were mostly finishing schools for elites, and they were democratized as part of a (brilliant, if we're being honest) regime intended to prevent repeats of the rise of Hitler or Mussolini or the American Bonus Army, basically giving places for trained killers to go and find opportunities for upward social mobility. You can see that in the tiny number if courses that are relevant to your job that are required to get a "degree" in that field. It makes sense for an elite ruling class to be well rounded in the sciences and humanities, but I can't say it makes similar sense for someone who wants to get vocational training to get a well rounded education when what they want is a job. Notably, the post-World war conditions that made the move necessary hasn't been true for generations. Most of the people the system was intended for are dead of old age, and so are some of their kids.

Another question is whether secondary schools are doing their jobs, since university is increasingly taking the place of high school in establishing basic competence employers can rely on, and some public schools have failed to graduate a single person reading, writing, and doing arithmetic at grade level. Part of the problem is Goodhart's law, that bureaucrats look at high school graduates making more money than drop outs and concluding that therefore we should help more people become high school graduates, which drives down standards and results in the value of such a diploma being diluted among all graduates, which ultimately results in the credential inflation we see.

But I'm just a blue collar schlub, so what do I know?

Breaking news that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, and at this point it looks as if the murder was committed by their son.

I was listening to the introduction to an edition of Paradise Lost and Paradise found. It went through the life of John Milton. One of the most interesting points of John Milton's life is that in spite of his greatest work being about God and satan, heaven and hell, and you might assume that he did his very best to live a virtuous life, it is evident from the behavior of his daughters that he was not fulfilling his duty as the family patriarch in the absence of his late wife. They grew up and grew old resenting the man, and through that reflection of his own behavior towards them they ultimately mistreated him in his old age and disability when he lost his sight. Even after death, his daughters were spiteful towards him, and fought his widow for the remainder of his estate, ultimately succeeding at taking most of his assets.

In the current era, I feel that there is no more salient lesson than this. The sins of the father do get passed down to their children, and the wages of sin is death.

Of course, that's not the whole story. Absolutely, parents can neglect and abuse their children, or spoil them through excess, or simply fail to impart proper values upon them. However, even in the best of circumstances with the best parents available wanting for nothing and being given the best in instruction, some children choose evil, or through physical malady haven't chosen for them. When the parents pay the sins of the children in such a way, you can hardly say it is anything but tragic.

I don't know what's the truth of this story is, whether it is 1, or the other, or some combination of the two. But for me, it is a whisper in my ear: Memento Mori. The only way we live on is through our children, and though we have not perfect control over the lives that they live after us they are reflections of us. More than any political advocacy, it is what we leave behind immediately surrounding us that defines our legacy. So if he was the architect of his own destruction, I feel pathos and pity for him, and if he was not the architect of his own destruction, then I feel deep sorrow at hearing of someone's good works crumbling within their lifetime.

After a very tiny bit of research, it looks as if that son had been struggling with substance abuse since he was a teenager, even to the extent that he spent quite a bit of time homeless. Those struggles were apparently the subject of one of Reiner's films. The world is vast and broad and you can never really say with certainty anything, but the idea that a teenager with multimillionaire parents becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol does suggest me that it is by the fruit of their tree that you will know them. It isn't mandatory, it isn't written in the stars that substance abuse from their son is automatically the parent's fault, but typically you're going to be looking at either a child who is trying to fill a hole with drugs and I'll call that they can't fill with family life, or a home environment where drugs and alcohol are so readily available that even a teenager can quickly get their hands on it. A third possibility is just that the kid made some very stupid choices very early on and there's nothing anyone else could have done.

I can't imagine being an old man slowly bleeding out because my son stabbed me in my life to death. I feel like the thing I would remember the most would be this thought that not only would I be dying but my son would end up dying in prison. The metaphor from Exodus about boiling a calf and it's mother's milk comes to mind.

Stoicism isn't being without emotions. Definitionally, stoicism is when you understand that there are things that you can change and things that you cannot change and you choose to focus on the things you can change rather than despairing.

We have a lot of people today who think that the only way to make the world a better place is by effectively taking over the world like a super villain. A few more stoic fathers and we might see those same people passionately acting locally in ways where they can actually change the world.

One caveat: this doesn't and has never meant "don't do hard things". What it means is that you can make the most impact right where you are, and focusing on a distant capitol you have little effect over (or worse, another countries capitol you have no effect over) when there's things to be done in front of you is a recipe for despair.

"yes, but that's us and this is you!"

Smart watches with 1-2 days of wear time are really stupid, and that's what most are even now.

I liked my pebbles but they all had big problems with design that screwed them up after a few years, the screen stopped working (and their waterproofing wasn't great)

I've got an amazing bip s which has epic battery life at 45 days a charge, but the pairing isn't great even with gadgetbridge and one of the features that was peak on pebble was sending a pre-selected response. You'd be surprised how well you can hold up a conversation with "yes" "no" "maybe" "lol" and "I'll send a message in a bit".

This is my son's's Slavic alien. There are a bunch of different aliens that project on the wall from this flashlight that he bought, but every time I see this one it just looks like someone from Russia wearing a tracksuit, so we always say "oi, suka!" When he shows up in rotation.

Noooooo Rufus you were supposed to save us, you weren't supposed to kill us!!

You've convinced me. Let's eliminate the income tax.

Most people don't know that cannaboid psychosis is a real and true thing. Also the cannaboid pain syndrome thing where your entire body hurts because of overexposure to pot.

I think a lot of people would be better off knowing about shit like that.

The Canadian government's not gonna like this!

So we should make everything legal on earth so nobody will ever do anything illegal!

I'm excited for legalized murder so we don't need to buy murders on the black market!

There's no such thing as safe, only "safe from what?"

It's all trade-offs, and to be safe from one thing means being unsafe from another and vice versa.

The wild West was such a dichotomy. Safe from many things people risked in Europe, but quite dangerous from many things that were resolved already in Europe.

If they got what they wanted, billions would die because it turns out we just need energy to live any sort of lifestyle we'd recognize.

I was thinking, even though yolo and memento mori convey a similar meaning, they really significantly differ. The former says "Do what you want now because you won't get another chance". The latter says "You won't be here forever so make your one chance count"

I understand that the term "latchkey kid" is generally associated with gen x and not the boomers, but the term is older, and was in some quarters associated with them. The term was created a couple generations earlier with the interbellum generation between WWI and WWII. It showed up in print in the 1940s because dad was off to war and mom was working in a factory so the kids had to fend for themselves.

There's a reason why one of the stories of the boomer generation is almost always "at 16 I moved out of my parents home".

Once dad came home, even in the postwar boom many of those fathers were home every day, the scars of the war remained and those fathers (and sometimes the mothers for different reasons) would be emotionally distant but authoritarian at home, having come of age in an environment like modernist mass conscription in a world war.

Later generations were branded as such, but the term already existed to explain a phenomena that was already in existence.

My last book, Future Sepsis, wasn't a romance, but it did have a romantic element to one of the arcs.

I was pleased with myself how I handled it. The male character's whole thing is he's highly moral and sees the world through an old fashioned lens, and so while they were in this traumatic situation and the woman POV character starts falling for him, he goes "Call me old-fashioned. But not here. Not now. We’re going to get off this island, and when we do, I’m going to ask you something, and let’s see where things go from there", and she accepts that for the moment because it's consistent with his character, who has slowly won her over through his insistence on giving her special consideration as a woman, something she initially was extremely hostile about.

My understanding is that such a move, as well as the lead-up to it, are sort of unusual in fiction in 2025. Morality is painted as a sort of vague general "be nice", not as a set of rules that sometimes prevents two people who want something from just going for it.

I saw a video recently about Gen Alpha kids and the mistakes their parents are making raising that generation.

One of the arguments is that the parents of Gen Alpha were abused and had nasty parents and so they're overcomensating.

Is it really that way, though?

Gen Alpha is largely raised by the millennials and a few early zoomers. They in turn were raised by the boomers. The boomers were actually raised by parents who weren't very good on account of the modern era's ending through the depression and the world wars basically traumatizing generations of people.

As a result, the boomers often raised the millennials with a very gentle, permissive, and protective style in contrast with the authoritarian and often abusive and neglectful childhoods they had. The boomers were, after all, the "latchkey kids" but also the generation to get the belt, and they are the ones who changed that.

The boomers get a lot of flack, but in some ways they've seen a whole change in the world. Yes, they grew up in the postwar boom, but they came of age just as that age was ending. They've been living in basically a world that has never stopped decaying around them. Early on when they were doing their basic childcare, many of them still had some benefits from the dead age before them, but their kids did not.

So what the millennials and early zoomers brought to the table would be this higher level of parenthood based in the postmodern era that rejected the modernist methods of raising children, paired with a lack of resources to implement that higher level of parenthood. This explains why they'd take shortcuts like using tablets or even buying adult makeup for children and pre-teens, because they don't have enough resources in terms of time, attention, or money to provide the boomer parent style upbringing.

I have transcended my corporeal body. Now I will play Xbox. No bloody 360, no bloody one, no bloody series s, no bloody series x.