I was told that I was smart. I felt like I was smart. My grades, my ability to answer questions while mostly asleep, and the fact that everyone always asked me when they couldn't do things all proved I was smart. Everyone told me I was destined for great things, and I believed it.

Unfortunately, since it took so long for me to encounter something that required me to actually work, I didn't learn to do that until far too late. I had plenty of time to run around being a smart little asshole, and later on, plenty of time to learn that everyone hated me for it, and only tolerated me for oracular ability to remember shit that was going to be on the test. Once I realized I actually wasn't going to amount to anything, on account of being too depressed to care about doing so, I also had plenty of time to reflect on how I was failing everyone who believed in my potential.

The mistake isn't telling them they're smart. It's convincing them that being smart is an important gift, and that it will bring them success and respect. You only get those things by learning things that aren't taught in school, and people should be able to feel like they're worth something without them anyway.

...How so? I just read it, and the only thing that makes it in any way "less sensational" is the fact that this mother and child are both so thoroughly whipped by this idiotic culture that they're playing along with the idea of it being the kid's fault for daring to have some cheek.

"You and every other human on this planet are apex predators with all that which that entails."

Ha. Wow. WOW. I love it when people do this. You say "apex predator" and you have this vision in your mind of something that is mercenary and heartless, driven only by its hunger and raw will to selfishly survive.

And you don't know shit about biology. Our ridiculous anti-romantic concept of "apex predators" is largely based on our historical cultural depiction of wolves... which is monstrously inaccurate. We became the dominant species specifically because of our tendency to altruistically cooperate, just as canines are the number two for basically the same reason. Just... god, read a book man, do you have any idea how stupid you sound? It's like a teenager's idea of how the most cool badass hitman would act. You know most sociopaths don't become CEOs, right? Those are just the exceedingly lucky and high-functioning ones. The rest of them all wind up in prison for pointlessly abusing people.

The natural result of a truly free market is socialism. Members of a vibrant community tend to realize that they do better when their neighbors do, and empathize with them enough to know that a streak of bad luck could make them the pest in their neighborhood, so it's good to take care of those who fall behind.

Capitalism is separate from the free market, and a perversion of it. A wealthy member of a community, before this "genius" invention was made, would've been happy to organize large projects for the public good simply for the prestige of having been in charge of them. Now they require that a portion of workers' labor be diverted to them permanently, returning far more value than they ever contributed. This encourages the venture capitalist to go play in other markets, leaving the community that made him with all the money he's stolen from it, and polluting others that he cares even less about.

While it has made large projects easier to start, those projects have had less and less value to the common people over time. At this point, the labor market is an arrangement whereby you either build something you don't care about for a rich person, or you don't eat. It is functionally indistinguishable from slavery, and it is not meaningfully consensual, given that is harder than ever to be an entrepreneur. We make a big noise about how the internet allows the little guy to make globalism work for him, but in practice what that means is that, in addition to the chokehold multinationals have on every mass market, you're fighting over the scraps of every niche market with literally every other person in the world with a vaguely similar idea.

Capitalism only benefits the people who won the game before everyone else had a complete grasp of the rules. It won't even work for them forever; the harder they play, the less is left for them to win. Capitalism will one day be remembered mainly as the most efficient way to exploit a community to death. Unfortunately, most of us have to rediscover what a functioning community is first, and that's not going to happen before an economic collapse that kills thousands of white people.

"Oh, and it would be nice if the US government would not make it so damned difficult for me to start a proper ISP."

You just mentioned the gun that's being used.

Times I've had a problem with a USB connector or socket: ...once? I'm actually not sure I ever have.

Times I've had a problem with not having the right connector because the standard gets dicked around with: holy shit that number is big.

n/t

I'm a socialist. :|

The one thing they TEACH effectively. Autocorrect makes me look like a public school graduate. :(

Yes, they certainly will. The one thing that public school does tech effectively is how to be a cog. I choose to value people, especially my family, by metrics other their ability to make money for rich people.

You can always tell an article is based on junk science when it contains the words "Alzheimer's," "cancer," or "AIDS." I'd bet my last cent at least two of the researchers involved in this are implicated in fakery by next week.

When I have children, I will do everything in my power to keep them out of school as much as possible. They will learn far more by just idly dicking around at a library. Our pedagogy is a terrible joke, and even good teachers' efforts are wasted due to the poisonous atmosphere created by forcing a heterogenous population of few thousand stressed and bored children to spend several hours a day together.

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile... that pretty much IS all the carriers already. Isn't everyone else just an MVNO through them in the US? Even if there's an exception somewhere, the fact that all four of those support it makes it clear that the carriers are not at all the problem. You can't text 911 because there's like... three cities that are actually set up to receive them.

I might never stop laughing.

It's quite the opposite; without the massive work of governmental abuse that is the War on Drugs, Silk Road would never have existed. Crackdowns do nothing but make criminals worse.