corrral

> I understand you're passionate about the issue and feel your spouse has been ripped off.

It's not just that we're personally harmed by the current system—we're in the "has a high-earning spouse" group so we don't need to both be adequately paid, though of course it'd be nice—but I've watched one good, experienced teacher after another bail on the profession over the years, because they do not get paid enough to put up with the shit they're subjected to, and at some point they see an opportunity outside education, realize just how badly they're under paid, and decide they're done with it. It seems to be getting worse, too, even before recent inflation started screwing with everything (I suspect the rest of this decade is going to be a slow-motion disaster for education hiring and retention, in excess of how bad it already was). I have kids, too, and they're in school, and I hate knowing that a bunch of the best teachers they might have will leave before they get them, because the work-conditions/comp ratio is so badly messed up that it's not only asking some sacrifice of teachers, but is practically abusive.

> There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.

Yeah, agree that the factors that make a "good school" versus a "bad school" are complex and that you can't just look at student outcomes to decide whether the quality of a school's instruction is actually above-average—especially with private schools, but also with public schools. Solutions to those problems that aren't actually related to school quality per se are hard to come by, without deliberately leaving some kids behind and/or increasing staffing levels dramatically (so, also significantly increasing district spending/budget). Lots of the problems, effective solutions start to look like "solve poverty", so... good luck. :-(

Didn't mean to be flippant with the good vs. bad school distinction—looking at various measures of student outcomes definitely doesn't give a full picture of how good a job a school, or a teacher, is doing, and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.

Email? I expect managers of library systems were still checking their email even when their buildings were closed.

Sorry, by the way, if I've misunderstood or misread some of your posts. I'm truly not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, and expect we agree much more than we disagree, overall. Also: yes, I'm sure you're right about your local market, and part of the problem discussing these things is that the situation in schools varies greatly state-by-state and region-by-region, so it's easy to get wrong ideas about things—teachers unions might be so powerful they're part of the problem, in some places, but in others they barely have any power at all so those very-common "teacher's unions are out of control and that's the main problem with education!" takes come off as something from another universe, or teacher comp might be borderline-OK in some places, but really, really isn't in others. Some places, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive that charge $40+k/yr and are all pretty good or even excellent—others, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive and they all charge $12k/yr or less and are all terrible (but do cater to religious and/or political preferences). It's a highly heterogenous field.

> We have spent the last 40 years reducing teacher autonomy, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's harder to get teachers who care.

I think schools are in a death-spiral where they can't get enough decent teachers with good judgement who can work autonomously, so they keep clamping down with more control over teachers' day-to-day activities, which just drives away more of the good teachers because working like that sucks.

Current high inflation (wage-inflation plus just the regular kind) is going to drive this to a crisis point before long, I think—when fast food joints have signs up begging people to apply at $17/hr with basically no education requirements, a starting salary in the low-$30k range requiring a bachelor's degree starts to look like something only a crazy person would opt to do.

[EDIT] Relatedly, school admin is also totally fucked up. The people doing those jobs are generally terrible for a bunch of reasons, including that they're also under-paid for the kind of person you'd really want doing those jobs, while also being very high-paid relative to teachers. Teachers who may or may not be good at teaching, but who are not good at admin, go into it because it's the only way to make real money in education until you're nearly at retirement age and holding a PhD, on a classroom teacher pay-scale, and people who can't hack it in private sector management go into it because it pays pretty well and you can coast while getting an ego-boost from being the Big (Wo)Man In Charge and bossing people around. The entire field is a cess-pit of incompetence, neglect, and outright idiocy, and it's a huge problem that doesn't get enough attention compared with teacher quality.

> IMO this is the biggest problem. And, indeed, teachers will take even lower pay to be in a private school situation with a parent community and student community that values education.

Lots of private schools pay worse than public schools, true, and do indeed draw teachers who are decent-to-good but sick of putting up with public school admin and parent bullshit—for reasons that are obvious if you think about it, but perhaps not intuitively obvious, private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are, and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"—but once you start to get into actually-good private school territory[0] pay and appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle) match or beat area public schools, typically.

[0] A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though—"how can that be? How do they keep getting enough students to stay open, in a competitive market that includes 'free' as an option?"—politics and religion, is the answer, and they can under-perform on academics year after year as long as they're delivering the message the parents want on those fronts. Incidentally, the teachers these schools draw with their lower pay aren't always leaving public education over legitimate bullshit, but often over perceived bullshit like "they wouldn't let me talk about Jesus as much as I'd like", and these are usually not good ones that the public schools are losing to private schools, but ones who we'd want to leave public education.

> I agree, but we have a whole lot of data that indicates that raising comp often has perverse effects.

Better tell waves hands at the entire private sector. They don't seem to have gotten that message. Seems like an opportunity to start a company paying 30% under your competition, so you can out-compete them by getting better workers.

> The data on whether this works in general is very, very muddy.

My spouse, with about a decade of teaching experience at the time, once had a former student drop out of high school and start working at as a gas station clerk at a major chain.

The student was making almost as much as my spouse, and if she stuck with it she'd be out-earning my spouse in a year or two. Total comp, benefits included, not talking just wages (school worker benefits are not and have not for some time been that good, really, and at least in my area are now pretty poor compared to offerings in the private sector). Clerking at a gas station. As a high-school dropout.

I'm pretty confident teacher pay is so bad that this "raising pay will draw worse candidates" (where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?) thing is not a real effect worth worrying about, if we're talking pay increases for teachers that are anywhere in a remotely plausible range.

> Really, any job that lots of people are drawn to by the love of it gets crap compensation by default. It affects the supply curve too much.

Sure, and as is typical you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career or have a much higher-earning spouse, who don't really need the salary at all. You don't get the trust-fund kids as much, as in other careers that are similarly pro-social or artistic, since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor, but otherwise it's similar.

But that's not enough, and I don't think paying teachers 50-75% of what any decent teacher could make doing something else with a teaching degree—not even assuming some entirely different life-path—is a great way to get a good candidate pool. Enough bodies, based solely on some idealistic drive (check in again in 5 years, let alone 10, on how well that's doing sustaining them, and for the ones who do need the money, which is most of them, on how their financial situation is adding to the stress that's driving them out of teaching) sure, but not enough good candidates. And it's not enough to keep the good ones around.

> Indeed, it may even have adverse effects: you draw people who want the money, instead of people drawn to the profession intrinsically.

This sentiment is a big part of suppressing teacher wages, and needs to stop. No, raising teacher pay will not result in getting worse teachers. We shouldn't be relying on charity and self-sacrifice on the part of teachers.

[EDIT] The general problem here is that we default to "pay more to get better workers" unless the job produces clear social good, then it's suddenly like "well if you don't want to badly under-earn compared to what you could make doing almost anything else, then you must not have your heart in the right place so will be bad at this anyway". It's some weird kind of sour-grapes thinking that we use to avoid paying people doing actually clearly important and socially beneficial jobs what they're worth, while the real money goes to people doing jobs that... aren't so clearly beneficial.

Yeah, all of our new ones around here seem to use some Dutch or German (I can't remember which) company and look almost exactly like that. All their merry-go-round type things are very different from the old ones we were used to, and IMO less good, but they probably also produce fewer injuries than the old design. They tend to come with notices warning that you probably don't want to let your 4-year-old get on some of the equipment, because it's not extremely safe for all ages. Some have climbing structures like the one in the picture that go up to about 2.5 stories.

Middle of the country, and we're usually like a decade behind trends on the coasts. There was a brief "rip out all the fun stuff" trend but it didn't last long and that was more of an '00s thing.

No fast food places have "fast food prices" anymore unless you heavily coupon and/or use their apps. Seems to be a method of price discrimination. If you're poor you know about the app and coupons and never pay menu prices. If you're not then you think "god damn, fast food got expensive" and pay menu price anyway, when you happen to go to such an establishment.

Like, they've always done coupons, but menu prices used to also not be a complete rip-off. They are, now.

The clock was crucial to timed recordings, which were how people recorded TV programs when they weren't around for them before things like TIVO existed. Set a it to record when your program's supposed to start and for X duration, put a blank tape in, go to work, come home and find it's recorded that daytime program you didn't want to miss.

If you weren't going to use that feature, yeah, it was pointless and could have just stayed blank rather than blinking 12:00 or whatever.

Gartner and their "magic quadrants" and all that crap is also, at least in part, pay-for-play, no?

I've seen some kinda "high design" sinks that do abandon all use cases aside from washing one's hands and teeth-brushing and such—so-shallow-it's-barely-there basin, fancy faucet that sends the water straight out in an arc instead of down, that kind of thing.

I assume, like having lots of mirrored or glass furniture/surfaces, they're the kind of thing you get when all the cleaning (and much of the childcare) is done by "the help", who will just have to deal with whatever unhelpful-to-them design decisions you've made. And when you're in a house that has a dozen or more total sinks, so you've also got a "mud sink" somewhere that's better for utility-type things—and maybe one for each floor, if it's the kind of house that has a utility/laundry room on every floor. Not so viable in normal houses where every sink needs to be a multi-tasker.

Right, absolutely. The conditions are also damn stressful, unless you're lucky enough to be at a school with amazing admin and co-workers and parents. That almost never happens.

Then the ones who are good but getting stressed out eventually start looking around and realize they could match their current comp assistant-managing a gas station, and that some of the extra things they've taken on give them experience that lets them gun for non-education jobs with way higher pay... and it's only a matter of time before they leave.

Reality is you'd need to at least double teacher pay to get a pool of teachers for whom the approach from one of these "amazing teacher does amazing thing" stories might—might—generalize well enough to be useful.

> Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built

Entirely typical of school reform efforts. Study or (more often) a book built around a study or two comes out, hype builds, consultants latch on, dumb-shit school admins get ahold of it (and use it as an excuse for a free trip or two to some BS conferences, for them and maybe a favored teacher or two), and then try to implement it without understanding it. They usually make two major mistakes:

1) Assuming the study's results will generalize to any school, disregarding even caveats or limitations called out in the very reference work that's the foundation of the reform.

2) Ditching parts they're uncomfortable with, failing to appreciate that implementing 80% of something may not even achieve 20% of the desired effect. They do this even when it's super fucking obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that the parts they're ignoring are key. They're especially bad about this with discipline systems, but it also frequently happens with other kinds of programs.

Then they do this again every 2-4 years. For a given kind of system (English instruction, math instruction, discipline, all kinds of things). Result: schools are constantly flailing around, with shit changing for no good reason almost every single year.

When I was 16 I waffled between the top edge of healthy and the bottom edge of overweight, according to BMI. When I dropped into the top edge of healthy I had a 6-pack. I wasn't even that muscular, just broad-shouldered.

Then you only know power users and computer geeks.

4k+ per day of junk food from ages ~15-20. Then I had to knock it off because I stopped being able to do that while staying trim (got fat fast, and I really was trim before). Which is probably just as well because that wasn't healthy anyway.

Dunno where it was all going. I wasn't really getting much bigger or taller for most of that span.

A high percentages of users don't and never did understand file trees and how to navigate them. They find their files by rote repetition and spatial memory. This is how people end up with desktops covered in files and directories—that's how they find stuff, and the notion you can start in one of those directories and move around until you're in one of their other on-the-desktop directories is foreign. It "is" in a particular place on their desktop, in their mind.

"Knew".

My parents wrote sequences of commands on a piece of paper that told them how to launch various programs. These were usually captured from manuals or from the output of installation processes (launched by following the manual). They had no idea how to figure any of it out on their own. What's "cd"? No clue. How does the filesystem look? How do you figure out where you are and get to where you need to be? Dunno.

The commands were just magic words to make the computer do the thing you wanted.

The first (harm) is about as mild as it gets, and the second is a common usage.

Webster's 1913:

> 2. Injury done to that which is entitled to respect, reverence, or observance; profanation; infringement; unjust force; outrage; assault.

> We can not, without offering violence to all records, divine and human, deny an universal deluge. - T. Burnet.

It's a bit more poetic a use, but it's not escalatory in the way you suggest.

[EDIT] Further, my point is (and I think that was clear?) that computerization necessarily does these things if you treat the computer as correct and humans as suspect, not that anyone's doing this on purpose.

I mean... from context, it's probably a mistake, but on the other hand we don't actually know the structure of that filesystem or the author's intentions.

Figured, but it's a pretty goofy way to introduce it after that comment.

[EDIT] I mean, you can almost "who's on first?" this.

"OK, what type do you want this to be?"

"Type."

"Yes, what type do you want it to be?"

"Type."

"Great, ok, yes, the type, what type is Config?"

"Type."

"WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE TYPE YOU WANT CONFIG TO BE???"

"Type."

flips desk

Shit, most cities in the US stopped seriously doing comprehensive contact tracing around the time NY threw in the towel, back in late Spring or early Summer 2020 IIRC. Yes, within months of it reaching our shores.

"Pushing mass testing" LOL in what universe? I guess they shipped out a second wave of those mediocre home tests recently but not that many of them and only if you asked. Otherwise you just go get tested at a doctor's office or urgent care if you start to feel terrible, if you want to, just like with the flu, so you know exactly how careful you and others in your household need to be about hanging out around old folks. In fact, one of the ones we recently did was a combo test for both Covid and flu.

Anything beyond that's coming from employers, not the government, and most of them aren't doing much anymore and haven't been for a while.

How so? Leading comma puts the terminator on the line after what it's terminating (which is why it bothers me, can't speak for others). This doesn't do that.

    {- You can optionally add types

       `x : T` means that `x` has type `T`
    -}

    let Config : Type =

Config's type is Type?

Clear as mud.

> It looks like "How" was accidentally dropped from the title so as-written it doesn't quite make sense because today Guernica is hardly considered a "flop".

I don't follow how adding "how" modifies the meaning in this way—making it clear it's about a historical and not ongoing situation.

Also, I think "how" is dropped automatically by HN because it's usually ugly and meaning-free clickbaitese.

> One of my coworkers has spent most of the last year sharing observations and ideas with the team that are things I pointed out three years ago. I don’t know if he’s giving me an overly subtle nod or he just doesn’t know he’s doing it. Like people who accidentally write a story/song they heard once.

I once suggested a product name in a meeting and everyone was like "eh" and then about five minutes later someone else (no, not a manager) suggested the exact same name to instant acclaim, and it was adopted. I don't think she did it on purpose, so I wasn't and am not mad about it, but it was odd.

Haha, Paris was exactly what I was thinking of. "Pretty lady, flower for you! You want flower? Flower for you, pretty flower for a pretty lady," pressing the flower toward the woman as if trying to give it away for free, and then if she takes it, "that'll be [insane price for a flower]", hand out for payment, and resisting taking it back.

Your best policy in public in a major city is to internalize Tony Stark's strong aversion to being handed things.