5,918 karma · joined January 10, 2011
I'm aware. The opinion piece is missing a lot of the major issues schools and kids are facing right now, major issues that play into why students aren't showing up for school.
Hence, my comment above.
I agree with you on that? I never advocated for raising taxes, I said "Schools themselves are chronically mismanaged" and that "teachers are underpaid" and they poorly fund their services.
> while simultaneously saying anyone questioning how they're run is obviously a "right wing extremist"
No, I'm saying the people who are running for school boards so they can openly hate all minorities and setup christian-nationalist views are "right wing extremists" -- https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4086179-six-reasons-wh...
These people are not "questioning how they are run" in good faith. They're trying to make schools hell for children to experience (and, frankly, their efforts are working)
- There are no real mental health services for students, especially those with extreme mental health concerns. (and even if you as a child, or your own children, don't need those services, you'll be lumped in with other kids who desperately do need it)
- Schools themselves are chronically mismanaged, generally due to funding issues. (some still don't have Air Conditioning, despite rampant global warming. Some still don't have any ventilation, despite being on year-three of a global pandemic, etc)
- Teachers have some of the lowest wages of any white-collar profession. (average pay here is $55k/yr). Teachers are so underpaid, they often can't even afford basic housing in the school districts within which they teach.
- Because of the last point, some of the teachers still willing to tolerate all-of-the-above are not necessarily folks who should be teaching. Some districts are heavily using/abusing substitute teachers as in-fill, which reduces the quality (and staff wages) even further. (google: Florida Teacher Shortage, and their plans to use unqualified military staff, as some kind of insane stop-gap plan)
- School boards have become weaponized, such that right-wing-extremists are taking control of them via poorly-noticed elections, in an attempt to destroy public schooling and make life miserable for all teachers and students. (google: Ottawa Impact or Moms for Liberty, as some examples)
- Right-wing extremists have demonized teaching as a profession, actively operate and fund hate campaigns against all public schooling, (and libraries, apparently), and they openly issue death threats or terrorism threats to any teacher who is kind to students. (see "Libs Of TikTok" and related)
It is absolutely no shocker that kids who aren't forced to go, wouldn't want to go. Why would any reasonable person want to deal with all of this?
Microsoft Office still exists, and can still open Word / Excel / etc files from 25+ years ago.
Adobe Photoshop still exists, and can open PSD files created 25+ years ago.
Microsoft Xbox One X still exists, and is backwards compatible with titles from the OG Xbox release, as far back as 22 years ago - https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/backward-compatibility?cat=...
Microsoft Zune (launched 2006) is still supporting and fixing compatibility issues, all the way up through Windows 11 now 17 years post-launch - https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-just-fixed-a-zune-compatib...
Warframe (Canadian MMO-lite third-person action video game) still supports every purchased piece of digital content ever sold, on all platforms, from the very first purchase, over the past 10 years. (I believe the same is true for Final Fantasy 14 which launched in the same year, but I'm less familiar with that one)
Vanilla accounts from World of Warcraft (now 19ish years old) still work and function today.
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I don't think anyone expects things to last forever. I think they're just expecting things to last longer than "a few years", and there's no technical reason why we couldn't ensure that.
They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M
When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing.
A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.
Their leadership isn't "awful", their leaders are finally doing their job, for the first time in decades.
Because that assumes "poor people" get "help" in a uniformly fair and anti-racist way, and that's never really true in the US today.
If you help "all people" with "no regard" to race, you have just participated in favoring white folks over all others, even though you likely don't realize it. The systems by which you choose to "help" all have various types of racism built-in, and you will have racist results as output, even if you yourself never directly try to commit such an act. (This is what systemic racism is, sometimes called 'institutionalized racism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism )
Affirmative Action, while not perfect, is one of the few things ever tried that actually accounts for this. It's saying, "you can't be more racist than X" where X is some kind of objective metric (say, "percent of enrollment by race"), and it does not care which of the thousands of people or systems involved are causing the issue, it attempts to force-corrects for it.
It is an emergency stop-gap, until such a future as that result is already happening naturally, making it redundant. The fact that we still depend on it ~60+ yrs later, is sort of living proof that we haven't really dealt with systemic racism yet. (As if all the other evidence, between housing, employment, police brutality and murders, etc, wasn't already enough)
If you stress-test everything to the max (Turbo Mode CPU+GPU, max power draw, while playing a game at 120fps) then yes, you can draw 150+ watts and it's too hot to safely have on your lap. But you can set it on a table and still use it comfortably. (The keyboard/trackpad never gets hot)
Notably, being able to choose which mode you want anytime is super useful. (I can turn this into a respectable gaming rig at a moment's notice, and it weighs less than a 16' MacBook Pro. I can also flip a switch and it's basically an ultrabook with 7 hours of battery life and silent fans -- or I can run it all day off a tiny 65watt USB-C charger in the office in that mode)
Having a high-watt charger means you have the option to use that electricity, not that you are required to do so.
To be clear, Reddit has had $350+ million dollars in yearly revenue for a few years now, primarily from premium subscriptions and ad revenue (ads that are not, in fact, always blocked by 3rd-party clients -- ads show up in reddit Sync Pro all the time)
They absolutely could roll back everything and be profitable. They're "struggling to profit" because the CEO is literally burning all the money trying to chase an IPO, not because there was ever any fundamental problem with Reddit's cost structure.
Respectfully, Twitter is kind of living proof of the opposite -- clearly they can overwhelm/outvote people (and even out-spend regular folks, if you throw an $8 price tag barrier up), despite being a small number of the total population.
Why would professors have "views" all that different from home? Professors are regular people too.
(Two of us in our friend group / community, are literally employed college professors, others are elementary teachers, software developers, IT folks, one designer, one electrical engineer, two in marketing, one who is in HR, one is a city bus driver, one who works in an automotive parts plant, one is a nurse, etc)
You guys like, have friends, right? Like, people who you see semi-regularly and are from your community, but who aren't necessarily from your employer or in your career / direct field-of-work? Friends that aren't also LinkedIn contacts?
Same, but like, how do you talk about any of that stuff, without also touching on "gender, relationships, and life dynamics".
Like, I have no idea how a group of friends would talk about, say "that cool new Spider-Man movie" without also talking about gender / race / life dynamics / etc. Those topics are so fundamental, they're a part of almost everything.
> It’s a very different story if you try talking to people in their 20’s or younger.
Is it? We're old enough that half of us have kids, and some of us have teenaged kids (13-19yrs old), and they also have friends and such. It doesn't seem that different to me. (They're less willing to tolerate arbitrary BS, but otherwise, don't seem wildly different than we were at those ages)
Where are you? In the US, most of us still have these conversations about gender, relationships, and life dynamics all the time. (If anything, this is arguably 70%+ of everything we talk about, among friends and acquaintances in the community).
> although despite assurances of maturity and openness conversation ends due to their inflammatory pronouncements.
Is there a common thread here? Can you imagine what might prompt such a response?
They've explained it before -- https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362... -- while they aren't confirming it's exactly one person, they've got strong data to suggest it's likely just one person, and for sure not some kind of community outbreak situation.
I pay Reddit so that others don't have to, to keep the forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to understand this, instead spending subscription money on like, avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
> The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money.
Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that existed in every little niche, most of which went away when Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+ million yearly revenue. Reddit won, they have a perfectly fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-functional social media experiences still left on the internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
> I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standard.
If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work. Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service" only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google, so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with little notice.
(I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some aren't that excited by Google right now.
You do, actually, pay more for "density". Moving things closer together, incurs extra costs (Even ignoring all other factors). Building codes have to be stricter (for equivalent safety levels), when buildings are closer together. Walls and insulation need more expensive materials (for equivalent sound dampening levels), when buildings are closer together. Insurance rates get higher (for equivalent coverage), when units are closer together. Labor costs are higher and labor time needed is higher (for equivalent results), and so on.
A few costs go down (less length of pipe material, or less length of wire, etc). But those minor material costs are usually far out-shadowed by the increases in labor to accomplish them (it costs less money to replace all shared water pipe in my 20 house suburban street, than it costs to replace all shared water pipe in a NYC mid-level with 20 units, even though the literal length of pipe material might be cheaper). It costs more to remodel a bathroom in Manhattan than in (say) Louisville, KY., even for identical bathrooms with identical fixtures and identical sqft.
Denser usually means more complexity or more labour, both things that cost extra money.
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Density advocates generally acknowledge this, density fundamentally costs more. Their argument usually rests on cities having hyper-overvalued properties -- the argument is that the extra cost of density is cheaper than the extra cost of land, and that's how they manage to make density look like a cost savings. Which kind-of works in major cities downtowns, but doesn't really pencil out elsewhere.
It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes.
> The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop
Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have cleaned up leadership a tiny bit and then left Activision-Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that Microsoft has treated Halo.
I think the problem is the newer models. I also have a WD MyCloud, but the "newer" Home edition one, and a lot of the features do not work locally, and require cloud connections. (Even local LAN-only file transfers, or managing the onboard Plex server and such, all have random cloud server junk shoved in the middle of them, to handle authentication and such)
I had to take pliers and scissors to mine and cut the harddrive out to rescue the data earlier this year, when the internal network board couldn't successfully reach WD's cloud system for some reason. I have to imagine any of the folks who bought devices like mine are just SOL until WD gets service back up.
And it's doubly-ironic because TikTok isn't getting banned because of Chinese messaging (that's already allowed everywhere, in all mediums). TikTok is under ban-threat in the US because Americans are using it for American messaging.
It's not meaningfully different than say, Turkey banning Twitter back in 2014 and such.
Ironically, they do almost all support this, you can mark any merchant as non-future-billable and prevent all future charges from a given merchant. Unfortunately, you have to call in and ask a phone rep to do it for you, most cards don't let you set this yourself.
It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a handful of other reasons, you may be locked to specific areas for a really long time.
Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had.
They can't really though, at least not anytime soon -- the cycle itself gives the cartel more capital. If they buy units as they come onto the market, they hold the equity in those units, which they can instantly mortgage out to get more capital, which they can spend on more units, which they can instantly mortgage out to get more capital. This is especially true when interest rates are low, (the lower rates are, the cheaper this cycle is to continue -- at interest rates below the real inflation rate, they effectively get given free money to do this)
And yes, it exposes them to the risk that eventually this bubble could pop, but it could take many years (decades even?) before that happens.
You still have to break up price fixing cartels like this. You can't just lean back and pretend "moar supply" will magically fix anything.
It seems clear to me, after the whole takeover via David Zaslav, that Warner Bros is being forced into an unearned bankrupcy -- they're actively killing anything they have that is-or-was new, exciting, or fresh (even many works already created and paid for). HBO Max was one of the few optimistic brightspots in that market, and they're now hanging it out to dry (and giving that market share to Paramount in the process).
But you know, the stock market loves it, so it must be good. I look forward to seeing this new version of "The Lord of the Rings", as lovingly crafted by the folks at TLC, exclusively on Discovery Plus.
This is objectively false, cars absolutely did get more expensive in the last 30 years, they cost about double what they did in 1990, even after accounting for inflation. (see https://thesoundingline.com/since-1990-the-price-of-a-cheap-... as just one example of the math on that).
They may "last longer", sure, but that can itself also carry negative impacts (particularly on fuel economy, safety, and air pollution)
I'd argue it's a combination of money and aging infrastructure. Money is the big one (cars used to be a lot cheaper, both to buy and to maintain. Incomes for most used to be much higher). Infrastructure is another, in a lot of places, they haven't meaningfully upgraded any of the public driving transportation infrastructure since the 1950s to 1970s, so a lot of infrastructure is handling car volumes 200% to 600% higher than they were ever engineered for.
In Michigan, there's still very much a lot of "fun/freedom" around cars. But our population has been pretty flat this entire time (+/-2% pop change YoY since the 1960s), so even though the infrastructure is old, it's usually appropriately sized for the population in all but the newest-growth places. If you live in, say Seattle, you very much don't get that experience, public vehicle transit infrastructure has not kept up at all, and so driving is artificially a lot more of a painful burden there.
- I don't have any meaningful control over where I'm allowed to work
- I don't have any meaningful control over where my spouse is allowed to work
- I only have a tiny amount of control over where I'm allowed to live (most of it prices us out, despite being above-average income)
- even if I do exercise some control, it can be changed or stripped from me by others at any time. (You may get laid off and have to find a new office. Or your office may move away from you -- when you are hired, the office might only have been 12 miles away, but later they moved the office so it's now 25 miles away)
- You may not always be allowed to move in response to those changes (you might not be able to afford to move your whole house every two years, when job situations for you/your spouse change. And if you have kids, doing this super disrupts any chance they may have at a social life via school)
- You may not even be allowed to change home or school locations. (Divorced people exist, shared-custody children exist and are in some places, the most common form of parenting in 2023, you might not be allowed to relocate your kids schools ever)
A lot of anti-transportation "15 minute city" idealists like to handwave away how incredibly complicated it is, to magically get your entire life to line up such that you don't ever have to travel medium-sized distances. That is an extreme luxury that most people will never have.