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Comment Re:Stimulation via Content? (Score 5, Insightful) 88

Better question is, if you can directly stimulate the brain and cause pleasure, why bother opening your eyes?

Oh right. Because movies are with propaganda, and the point of the brain stimulation is to break your capacity for critical evaluation.

I'll pass, thanks. I read Spider Robinson, I know how this turns out, and I don't feel like being found sitting in a pile of my own excrement with a beatific grin on my face...

Comment Re: The Pirate Bay (Score 1) 302

Well, the ones I helped build provide food for the community farmers in their individual plots, and they also provide freshly picked vegetables to local upscale restaurants, and they also provide several tons of food to the food bank each year, and they conduct weekly educational sessions, inviting the people who go to the food bank to be direct participants in what is keeping them alive each day.

One of them is surrounded by a "wall of food", a kind of a hedge built entirely of perennial food bearing plants. I ended up coming into that project later in its history, it was your traditional "grid of personal plots in a field" type of urban garden, and the first meeting I went to was a discussion about how to prevent starving homeless people from stealing food from the plots. The wall of food was my idea, inspired by Geoff Lawton's system of building food forests.

"Liking farming" didn't really have that much to do with it for most of the people concerned.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Interface

I plan on trying the suggested browsers, but thought I'd revisit Opera first. It dawned on me that changing browsers is going to be a big PIA, since Firefox holds a bunch of passwords.

It's been at least a decade since I've tried Opera; it was brand new when I last tried it. So I installed the latest one. The result was...

Comment Re: The Pirate Bay (Score 2) 302

Working hard to protect human culture from those who would prefer to see it surrounded by a most and accessed via a toll bridge controlled by them?

It's not just about having access for myself, it's also about cutting off the money supply to the industry.

Having the Library of Alexandria for myself isn't going to protect me from the ignorance of savages. Only ensuring that they too have a copy can do that.

Comment Re:I find this amusing... (Score 2) 250

Will people latch on to this and try to disseminate it? Probably.

Will they be any more impartial than the news media?
Doubtful.

Eventually people might realize that they can't trust reporting, that they must survey things for themselves, and that they shouldn't trust people who make decisions without surveying things for themselves, because those people don't know shit. Probably not, but it could happen.

They'll be old by then, though, and another generation of naive people will be fleeced.

Comment Re:Just let them test out! (Score 1) 307

As far as I'm concerned, this is completely unheard-of in my country. Standards are generally pre-set, and if half of the class fails where the previous year's students had few problems, well, that's their problem, nobody's going to lower the standards for this year's class.

The philosophy that schools are intended to teach a certain well thought out base of knowledge and only pass those who demonstrate that they've learned all of it is not universal.
 
It requires a great deal more maturity and responsibility and humility. The teacher needs to be a lot more self critical about what's in the curriculum, the students and parents need to be prepared to accept the fact that their talent and discipline may not be sufficient for the role they've decided they're interested in, and society needs to be prepared to accept that neither needs nor expectations will make a person capable if they don't have the talent or determination necessary.
 
What's popular these days is to just throw together a curriculum that relates to the course subject without regard for whether or not the students can absorb it, then just sort the class from best to worst and push the best ones forward. It's less demanding on the teacher, and it never allows their competence as a teacher to be subjected to critical analysis. It's also less demanding on the students... the teacher doesn't set the bar, the students do. And, society as a whole can look at the schools churning out certified, educated citizens and tell themselves they're doing just fine.
 
This way, when everything goes to shit, they can blame the "other", the ones who didn't play ball with the system, for their societies collapse. And, that's the most important thing. Because no pain is so bad that it can't be made 10 times worse by having someone tell you that it's your own damned fault and knowing that they are right.

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