One wonders what will happen to these schools’ accreditations, really.

I mean, if you’re teaching something you call history and you don’t teach students how to put the course content in its historical context and interrogate those sources critically, you’re not teaching them history, you’re indoctrinating them.

…tho to be fair, that’s honestly what passes for US History in most US schools. The more history I learn, the more I realize most of us aren’t taught

On the one hand, do I think they did it? 100% yes. On the other, am I surprised the law is signaling they might do something about it? Also yes.

There have been dozens of credible reports of such violations, of children being maimed and losing limbs even, and now finally there’s a probe? Watching the law take this much time to announce it will begin to investigate what’s been in the news for years almost convinced me it didn’t want to do it at all.

One of the most-striking experiences of my regional metro core’s death throes was needing to pee but my train was delayed. Tried walking across the way to the local train station to use their facilities but the security guy they’d hired to keep the homeless out about fought me to keep me from using the restroom.

If you wonder why your city streets and transit zones smell like piss, it’s because when you lock up your bathrooms to keep the homeless people away, they’ll piss on your street

I am ever amazed that these people believe they can gut education (or even just the parts of it they want to keep people ignorant about) and still live in a first-world country

allow the market to decide

Yeah. After all, when “the market” decides something, that usually means the public interest wasn’t profitable enough to the people making decisions in it

It’s wild to me that public resources like water are given, not sold, to corporations like Nestle- who then go on to lobby for less public spending on water systems, and who mass-produce those shitty bottles that end up everywhere.

Charge them royalties for taking water from springs, make it cheaper for nestle to buy water from a utility.

It’s about time we stopped protecting Nazi politics under the rubric of ‘free speech’.

The countries that don’t do that still have freedom of expression (and they tend to have human rights protections even more expansive than ours), it’s just that it makes no logical sense to hide nazis (whose politics amount to advocating against human rights for particular people) under the skirts of human rights protections.

Well, I’ve traded burning fuel for burning internet and electricity at my home. My electricity at home is mostly solar (from my roof) and hydro from the grid (I live in Washington State).

Working from home spares me ~20 uncompensated transit hours a week, so the emissions difference (whether I use transit or drive) is substantial and so is the cost savings (in fuel and parking). FWIW, my employer will pay for my transit fares (but not fuel or parking) and that’s nice and all, but I’m squeamish about transit during flu/covid season because of all those coughing people going in to jobs that don’t encourage them to stay home while sick.

I’m able to work more hours when I do it from home because I’m not constrained by transit schedules/catching the last train out of town, and that way I still come out ahead in terms of having time with my kids, and I have time to take grocery shopping and meal planning and prep off of my wife’s plate.

It’s better this way, not just in terms of cost and environmental impact and quality of life, but productivity-wise.

I question the ‘less productive’ part of his claim here

If I commute (2 hours, one way) the time I can spend in the office is bounded by how early I have to leave in order to catch the last train home. Not only does that mean a 5-day week involves 20 uncompensated hours, it literally limits my time in the office to about 45 hours.

Today, working remotely, I can bill 50 hours in the week and still see my kids. I get more done this way and they know it. If they want me in the office every day, they can pay me my hourly rate to commute

This is probably what you can expect when the subject matter is as fraught as anything-mental-health can be, and when what passes for clinical experts willing and able to share information on it are so rare as to be unicorns, plus many of them are working from outdated DSM criteria anyhow.

I was clinically diagnosed during the pandemic, then turned unpacking my own experience of autism into a new special interest (lol of course I would do that). I specifically follow quite a few accounts on tiktok belonging to health care practitioners and researchers, and I regard what they have to say in that light, while I also follow lots of ‘hey-I-self-diagnosed-now-let’s-talk-about-it’ accounts and consider what they have to say in that light.

I’m left with the impression that the researchers and practitioners are in an exciting, evolving field in which the subject matter is less-well-known than we might all like, and that the lay autistic folk sharing their experiences are doing it because frankly, the experts weren’t filling that need and what do high-masking/hyperverbal autistic folk do when we know a thing or two? We infodump, that’s what we do. (like this. you’re reading it now. sorry, not-sorry)

Are we always right? Heavens, no.

But, is the bar low to begin with? Oh, yes. Yes, it is. For example, while these tiktokers are sharing what they think (maybe it’s wrong, or DSM-inaccurate, etc.) there are also charlatans out there waving autism around like it’s a boogeyman your children get if they receive vaccinations, when there’s no evidence to support claims like that.

what Putin might possibly have over Musk’s head

Well they both had connections with Epstein and have moved in similar circles- that whole thing smells like a long-running Kompromat operation targeting top industrialists and financiers, frankly.

As for Elon’s wealth making him untouchable? My dude, leverage is a thing and he is leveraging other people’s money and as such, he depends heavily upon those arrangements staying where they are. The interest on loan he took to fund the Twitter takeover (with other people’s money) is a lot, and whether or not Twitter can cover those costs is a very real question. This looks a lot like the debt traps Trump is in- they might both have money, but their money is tied up in assets it’ll cost them something to liquidate (and which they can’t readily get more of) and when that starts to look like cycling loans around to stay liquid, that adds up to pressure.

There’s good reason to expect that Putin has some sort of hold over Trump- he fits the profile (bad at business, constantly needs money, will do anything for attention, has been mob-adjacent his whole life, has been actively groomed to be an asset by soviet-bloc intelligence services, etc).

Now that I see Elon getting the same sort of head-pat treatment, I expect he’s in similar thrall and begin to wonder if that kind of public statement from Putin is anything but a public, encoded reminder that the leash is still there and if he doesn’t behave it all comes tumbling down.

Y’know, I wanted one until I learned anything about Tesla as a company or about Elon, and then I decided it’s vaporware and will probably never be delivered for reasons that are stupid. Looking from the outside but with experience shipping big software releases, this smells a lot like what you get when you think of QC not as an engineering discipline, but as a cost to be minimized.

Ghoulish.

Reducing the ‘value’ of a life to monetary terms just means it’s legal to kill them if you have the money.

Also, that shit should be disqualifying in people supposedly sworn to uphold the law

Rented a Tesla this summer for a trip with my family- where I was in Michigan, the nearest superchargers were in the lot at Meijers (a regional supermarket chain), which made sense for Meijers (there’s already a big lot there, already infra, it’s a place you can tie fueling up with getting groceries) but it meant I had to drive half an hour to shop instead of going to the local market.

My thought is that they should be planting superchargers (or their functional equivalent) in every store or restaurant parking lot because when the only place to get a charge is in the next county over, that’s directing EV drivers there and not local

Yeah, it’ll cost something to build out infra to support that much power but honestly the US grid needs the upgrades anyhow- and if anything, electricity is relatively cheap compared to buying gas

mmmm. While I like the idea of dismantling any barrier to building more-affordable housing, I really don’t like putting churches in the position of having the homeless be beholden to them. Part of the reason so many churches object to public anti-poverty/anti-homeless policy is that they’re angling for the bar to be lower so they can leverage people’s desperation into the opportunity to proselytize to them and convert them to their faith.

I am reminded that Jesus didn’t command his followers to keep people hungry and poor in order to make them into believers of Jesus, he said that helping the poor and downtrodden is the way to come to know Him.

Keep the church out of the poverty business, thanks. Also while we’re at it, never ever forget that it costs the public more in taxpayer money and resources to keep homeless people homeless than it does to put them in an apartment and give them some time with a social worker.

Y’know, if I could use gmail and pay a few bucks to do it (and not be tracked everywhere without a way to opt out) I would do it. Likewise for any social media that makes its money by trading my privacy for it, I would pay them for the service of being a conduit by which I can keep track of friends and family if it meant I wouldn’t be followed everywhere by ads. As for how ad revenue funds so much of the useful content online, it’s depressing as hell to see that political propaganda is free while informative media is sequestered behind paywalls. I’m old enough to remember when the news was a prestige business and didn’t have to turn a profit

The fact that platforms like Meta give advertisers (or propagandists) the ability to target their messaging to people that fit a detailed profile, tho, ensures that our politics can now be cheaply and profitably flooded with shit, and that in real ways is a threat to democracy, I think.

they did it targeting the super wealthy instead of blocking traffic or otherwise hindering innocent people

Reminds me that the point of protest is to be disruptive. Oh, you’re blocked on your way to do your job? Your job is to do your job, not to fight other workers on behalf of your employer

I don’t get the whole ‘protest should not ever inconvenience anyone, ever’ line of thinking- if I’m travelling for work and I get stuck in traffic behind a protest, I bill my time and that’s how I pass the disruption signal along to where it needs to land

I can see an argument for the proposition that maybe we don’t need dogs that are big and powerful enough to injure or kill people.

But, I take claims about how a breed “is gentle” with an entire ocean of salt- individual dogs might be calm and well-trained or socialized, it’s the ones churned out of puppy mills to be sold at top dollar to shitty people who want a tough, scary dog that seem to be sketchy.

I’ve been around lots of well-adjusted big dogs that are just big hunks of love and slobbery affection, but really I hate seeing stories about how some dog that “is a good boy” mauled a child and if I had my druthers, dog owners would be required to carry liability insurance proportionate to the dog’s size or bite force or some factor correlating to its breed, and to the dog owner’s income or wealth. Oh, that would make big, dangerous dogs too expensive to own? Maybe they should be.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of […]

Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.

I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.

I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I’d been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn’t want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There’s nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)

It’s 9 years on and I’m working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don’t make what I was making then (and I’ve been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I’m at is a good fit, they’re accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn’t the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.

Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don’t care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I’m a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I’d reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that’s not happening and when I think too hard about that it’s not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)

Looking back, I recall being abruptly ‘let go’ from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.