I've heard a philosopher say somewhere that one of the great paradoxes of American society is that we demand liberty in the public sphere, but we demand authoritarian control in the workplace. No kings, no lords, but your boss deserves your submission.

There's a post on the Teachers subreddit where a teacher brags that they just gave their entire class a 0% grade for cheating on a paper. The teacher says they fed all of the kids' papers through an AI program called TurnItIn, and the AI confirmed that most of the students' papers had similarities to each other and had AI-generated text. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1bwojmm/kids_think_chatgpt_is_going_to_save_them_turnitin/

In the replies, someone said they tested TurnItIn by submitting an estimate paper that they wrote on their own. TurnItIn said the estimate was 94% written by AI. A college student claims that all of their papers were declared 50%â"90% written by AI, except for when they submitted an AI-generated paper as a test and it came back as 25% written by AI.

Whenever someone claims that AI is about to replace a job function, ask for the rate of false positives.

Another possible angle: some automatic transmissions get better gas mileage than stick shift, but stick shift cars usually have a lower sticker price. When I bought my Chevy Spark ten years ago, a tiny car for absolute cheap-asses, the no-frills manual-trans model cost $1000 less than the basic auto-trans model. I wouldn't be surprised if kids are buying stick-shifts because the upfront costs are less expensive and the overall cost of living is going up.

> When you started the course, you took a practice test which was a real test because they're published later. The questions changed, but the general *type* of question was fairly constant so those practice tests remained relevant. Be careful with some of those test prep classes. I've heard accusations that their first practice tests are a little more difficult than the actual tests, so you score a little lower on your early tests and your real test looks better by comparison, and makes the classes look good.

The general comment I've heard, from people who honestly care about admissions for under-served students and communities, is that standardized tests are biased toward the rich, because they tend to use content and language that you mostly see in advantaged communities. But all of the other admissions criteria are even MORE biased toward the rich, for all the reasons you mention, because you do need a lot of money to target those admissions.

In terms of the philosophy of ethics, officially the definition of evil/wrong is when it would cause you suffering if it was done to you.

I would suffer if I went to prison. Therefore, it is wrong to send anyone to prison.

Except, obviously, if I was actually a murderer, then it would be correct to send me to prison. I feel justified in saying "Murderers should go to prison" because, if my own personal ethics also drop that low, then I also deserve to suffer for my crimes.

If I ever look at the evidence that the vast, vast majority of COVID deaths are from unvaccinated people, and the breakthrough cases in vaccinated people have much lower consequences than for the unvaccinated, and I go around the internet loudly proclaiming that the vaccines are a hoax and we should just take Viagra instead, then yes, my ethics would be awful, and I would be intentionally contributing to the suffering of others, and you would have the right to laugh at my death.

I'm sure that there's a deeper ethical discussion about how to decide whose ethics are actually laughably bad, but I have no problem with saying that it would be correct to apply this same medicine back to me if I were so awful as to put myself in that same position.

That's my real worry with bootcamps and alternative education. I don't doubt that you can learn a skill at these camps. Hell, you could learn a skill by picking up a textbook and just teaching yourself in your free time. I've honestly considered quitting my job and hitting a bootcamp to change careers.

But my question is, am I going to get hired with just a bootcamp on my resume? Is this a problem with the inadequate alternative schools? Or is this a case of strict hiring practices that won't hire trainable entry-level employees unless they have a four-year degree on their resumes?

When involuntary unemployment exists, the marginal disutility of labour is necessarily less than the utility of the marginal product. Indeed it may be much less. For a man who has been long unemployed some measure of labour, instead of involving disutility, may have a positive utility. If this is accepted, the above reasoning shows how 'wasteful' loan expenditure may nevertheless enrich the community on balance. Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly 'wasteful' forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict 'business' principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

I'm old enough to remember when libertarians used to talk shit at Keynes for this quote. How dare the government waste money on digging holes just to give people jobs. And now we've got a true self-made entrepreneur demanding his right to spend natural gas on meaningless tokens, because think of the jobs.

Do not taunt happy brilliant jerk?

I concur. I cannot help but be amazed at the number of people who think that Blizzard killed their puppies or something. I mean, just look at this thing... "Gift of the gods?" "The new best game ever?" I think Borderlands 2 is probably the game of the year, but I don't think anyone's granted it sainthood yet.

And then there's this: Sure, you can only reallocate the last three skill points you've spent, and you can't redo all your stats and skills once you're leveled up. That's so that you learn from your mistakes and go back and play the game again. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I'm halfway through Borderlands 2. I want to try Guild Wars 2 when I'm done. I have a double-digit list of games from Steam sales that I haven't gotten around to, including wanting to finish SpaceChem. Do not tell me that it's a bonus for me to have to play a game multiple times in order to figure out what works. That is goddamned Stockholm Syndrome, and I have other things I could be doing.

I played Diablo 3. I beat inferno with my monk before paragon levels were introduced. I had a full set of good gear, but I stuck with tankier stuff and mostly ignored damage so that I wouldn't need millions of gold in order to buy what I needed. This meant that I couldn't cruise through the last area and had to do a ton of kiting and positioning, but it also meant the last playthrough was a genuine challenge, and I enjoyed the trying to keep up valor stacks while trudging my way through heaven.

D3 was not the game of the year. The online issues were horrible. The crafting system was unnecessary for what it was. The difficulty of inferno was enjoyable for me since I got what I wanted from the AH, but it also required people to stalk the AH since the just-good gear that they got from drops wasn't enough to go on. But it was also a game that uniquely dared to let me mix and match and try out twenty-five different skills to my heart's content, to find things that I liked or to just experiment when I got bored of one path, and you wouldn't have to torture me to say I liked what I played.

I will probably buy Torchlight 2 on the winter sale, and then I'll wait until there's a respec mod for cheaters before I turn it on. I want to not be angry about this - I honestly have no issue with games existing for people who are not me. You want a game based on oldschool skill trees and locked-in levelling? Hey, go have fun. But I personally can't play another game where I click the same skill a billion times without getting to try out anything else, only to have to quit at level 30 because the choices I made at level 20 made me too weak to progress further, and there's something that gets under my skin about what seems to be a whole political movement that thinks that makes me a socialist.

You know, I read 1984 when I was in junior high (which was in the early 90s), and it was a dark and frightening read. But it didn't really hit me that hard. Then as an adult a few years ago, I watched Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time, and it depressed the hell out of me.

1984 is a story about an ultra-competent government that manages to run everything just the way it wants to and convince people to act and think how it wants. Brazil was a story about an amazingly incompetent government that so much fails at it's job as to take society down with it. Guess which one I find more relevant to the current state of affairs?

I have a friend who's veg but allows for dairy products, which is where I believe she gets a lot of her protein. That might be an interesting question, is whether or not cows as dairy machines could provide the same protein/fat requirements as meat on using less energy or space.

Ah, 4th edition. You tried so hard, and you largely succeeded. You gave healers something to do other than cast heal spells every turn, and a day of dungeoneering was able to continue past the first battle instead of everyone going, "The cleric's used up his spells - we're going back to base!"

You gave defensive builds a place in the world without making them boring. You took away a wizard's level 1 crossbow and gave him all the fireballs he wanted. You gave every class something to do other than basic melee attacks. You made characters interesting right from level 1 instead of forcing people to pray for an interesting character 10 levels down the road.

You took away multiclassing, and there was a gnashing of munchkin teeth, but you gave us arcane swordsmen and holy assassins and psychic healers. You broke up the age-old racial tradition of just elves, humans, and dwarves by sticking tieflings, dragonborn, goliaths, and devas into the main books. You got rid of prestige classes, those wonky things that forced people into specific build types, and instead gave us multiple builds for the base of a class and paragon paths for later on. Your flavor was more focused on the character than on the class min/maxing.

But, in your certain rush to fix everything that was wrong with D&D, you forgot the feel. You felt that you could discard the very makeup of the game and craft something new from scratch. Despite the interesting things that happened to a new character, your demand for balance forced you to keep everyone the same beyond level 1. While many people rallied behind you, you split the community as the players who had been in the game for years threw up their hands in disgust and went to a fork of your previous system, preferring an imperfect system that felt more like something from their youth and less like those infernal MMORPGs.

I've seen the playtest, and at first glance it looks like something that tries to bring the two groups together. But the PnP RPG faces a diminished audience from the outset, what with kids all distracted by their new-fangled machine, and the audience that you drove away has come to call you a heretic and isn't bound to return even if you pander to them again. Godspeed to you, Wizards, but I fear there's not much more you can do.

It's not just IT. This link is a graph of all reported employees in America over the past four years: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-chart-public-sector-vs-private-sector-employment-2012-6 In summary, the number of workers in the private sector is back up to about where it was in 2008 (which is still too small for a growing economy). It's the lagging public sector that's keeping overall employment rates below where they were before the recession.