So what are you mad about?

Just said kids in college read cliffs notes twenty years ago. I’m not sure why this bothered you.

You weren’t taking English classes

Wasn’t I? Could have sworn my transcript says otherwise.

Omg, are we finally going to see a Congress that’s serious about enforcing subpoena power?

Cause I remember the J6 Committee subpoenas getting laughed off five years ago.

Beyond Scavino, the panel has also subpoenaed former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former adviser Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, a former chief of staff to then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

And a quick Where Are They Now query indicates none of them went to jail. Hell, Kash Patel is running the FBI. What a twist!!

I gotta wonder what was going on back then…

If President Joe Biden truly believes, as he’s said, that the executive branch cannot stonewall Congress, his administration should start by recognizing that individual members of Congress have oversight powers.

…

The DOJ has interpreted “Congress” to mean only the full House or Senate or their committees or subcommittees — but not individual members. This interpretation provides the executive branch with a loophole, allowing it to stymie valid information requests from individual members of Congress by limiting the type of information individual members can access. According to this loophole, members of Congress — who are duly elected and have sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States — can access only documents and correspondence that are available to the general public. This DOJ loophole is at odds with the principles of our democracy, and it undermines Article I of our Constitution.

Damn that Extremist Conservative DOJ! Ah well, nothing we can do. Just didn’t have the votes to change things back then.

I probably read 500 pages a week on average.

Pride and Prejudice alone is 400 pages. Crime and Punishment is another 600 pages. If you have two Lit classes in the same semester, you’re going to have to double that rate or fall behind schedule. Nevermind retention.

I remember sitting in a library surrounded by books, struggling to solve the 15 problems a class Engineering Physics assigned. Just a fist full of brain-teasers day in and day out. Three of us working together managed to clear the load in a couple of hours. Then on to the next assignment, which was another two or three hours. Five classes a day, you’re lucky when you have enough time to sleep.

I’ll admit, I did a few summers at a community college and that workload was much smaller, the tests were far easier, and the graders significantly more forgiving. Crazy how little work it takes to ace an exam in High School Plus relative to a University weed-out program.

College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different.

I love Vibes Based Reporting.

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

As someone who was in college twenty years ago, I’ve got to say there’s no way in hell I could make it through an entire novel in a week while balancing the rest of my course load. Either I’m reading the Cliff’s Notes or I’m not getting it done. I also ran a 15-hour course study in hopes of landing a triple major in four years (bad idea, kids!), but even with a more conservative 12-hour load, imagine this plus 3 other classes making the same demands on your time.

This isn’t a new problem. It is, perhaps, a problem that the current generation of students no longer has the cheat-codes to navigate. But doggedly insisting people were housing a 400-page book in a week and retaining it for meaningful discussion? Get fucked, dude. Nobody was actually doing that ever.

If you could come to the table talking about these novels, its because you already read them in High School, not because you consumed them in a week in your hectic freshman year.

Goes a bit farther than that. I have a family friend who struggles to read the menus at restaurants. But she’s also desperately poor, a high school drop out, and regularly between jobs in a service sector that’s totally unforgiving to people in her position.

I do think there’s a reinforcing cycle of “Everything is written at the 6th grade level” -> “Everyone communicates at the 6th grade level”. But I also don’t think these articles do a good job of defining the difference between a 4th grade, 8th grade, 12th grade, collegiate level. So when you see this statistic, its not entirely clear what the problem is, per say. Like, what isn’t being communicated beyond 6th grade literacy levels that people need?

Per the article:

Here’s the ugly truth nobody wants to admit: a barely literate population is a controllable population.

Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.

…

Mental health outcomes are catastrophic. Depression rates have skyrocketed. Anxiety disorders are endemic. Suicide rates have surged, particularly among young people who inherit this deteriorating nightmare and see no viable future.

…

The economic cost of illiteracy alone is staggering — research shows that raising every American adult to sixth-grade reading level would generate an additional $2.2 trillion annually.

Few citations, lots of big claims and speculative statements, the tendency to catastrophize (and inject implicit nostalgia) as though 6th grade literacy trends are a shocking new development rather than the historical baseline.

None of it really translates into actionable policy. All it seems to do is feed the prevailing Everyone is Stupid Except Me self-aggrandizing outlook. I tend to see these articles paired with the inevitable reactionary “We should impose literacy tests on voting” and “Would have this problem if not for all the damned rednecks / illegals / minorities / <insert reviled social group here>” outlooks.

Everything published at or below 6th grade reading level

Americans consume this content almost exclusively

The median reader consumes at or below the 6th grade level

I think the better question is why a woman with movie star charm would put up with someone who thought she was an idiot.

Seems like the relationship is doomed from the start if providing a simple response to an easy question antagonizes you.

Satan isn’t a pedo.

I wouldn’t hang my hat on this. Satanists have as much a problem with pedophilia as every other branch of the Christian faith.

It’s Heads-I-Win and Tails-You-Lose in the Trump-stacked court system.

You’re looking at the judiciary as some kind of impartial machine, but you need to see it as a Vegas Casino, where you can maybe win a hand or two here or there but the game is stacked against you by design.

There is no world in which a conservative court bans Christmas Trees or Crosses or any other Christian iconography, because these courts are run by evangelical Christians for the benefit of evangelical Christians. You might as well ask a Chinese court to remove images of Mao from the classroom or an Iranian court to outlaw the Koran.

To think, if we’d had this kind of majority 20 years ago, we could have removed the entire study of evolution from high school criteria.

You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.

We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.

I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.

I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.

Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)

I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.

The history of the protest-turned-riot-turned-massacre is genuinely incredible. I wish more Americans learned enough about Chinese history to understand the significance of the event. It wasn’t just one guy in front of a line of tanks. And the movement didn’t end in Tienamen, either.

Dengism into the 21st century was defined by that movement and the backlash and it’s reverberations. Modern Chinese domestic policy exists as a combination carrot and stick to discourage this kind of insurrection from happening again.

Would that the US people had the kind of courage and social cohesion necessary for a Tienamen in the modern day.

you techno utopians are funny.

I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.

It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.

Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”

Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.

US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.

I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.

One begins to question how she was awarded the prize in the first place

nobody cared

Trump Threatens Iran Intervention. History Shows When Foreign Support Works

Somebody clearly cares

They can’t even shut down the base in Greenland. There’s a reason DeGaulle kicked the US out in 1966. And why Okinawa residents have been lobbying to shut down the local base for decades.

Europeans have been under military occupation since the end of WW2, telling themselves the gun pointed at the back of their heads was aimed at the USSR, even after it dissolved.

Now they’re going to have to deal with a foreign hostile occupation whose roots have grown deep