Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Most of the pressure that teens come under derives from their need to fit in with their peer group. Just *try* to fix that in a way that doesn't make things worse.

OTOH, adding this extra pressure can't be good.

It's one thing to tell the parents, and even that can be problematic. It's another thing to make it a part of the administrative record...which is nearly always a bad thing to do.

You left out that in the past software updates have changed data marked private to data marked public without notice to the holder of the account. Of course this doesn't prove that they'll do it again...

Well, if it teaches them that, then maybe the school is doing its job.

Seriously, most kids have no thought about how what they post will later affect them. If the school teaches them to be careful, and avoid letting "the man" know what they are up to, it may be performing an important social role....probably not the one it's intending to, however.

Ok. It could have been just incompetence. But either they were grossly incompetent, or they knew ahead of time that something quite major involving airplanes was coming quite soon, and at least some of those involved....and they just let it go forwards.

I'll agree that this isn't a "false flag" operation as normally understood, so I believe that 9/11 wasn't actually a false flag operation. But it was known about ahead of time, and some of the details were known. The question is did incompetent "superiors" ignore the operation, or did malicious "superiors" suppress the information. This is just based on publicly available information. To say eactly how much they must have known would be a guess.

OTOH, reportedly the Germans informed the US intelligence agencies that something major was coming up quite quickly (I wonder what the actual wording was), and the US indicated that they should keep quite. (And I also wonder what the wording of the response was.) Important details were missing from the news story that I read, so I don't know exactly what this means. But judging by the response after the event, it was more major than expected, but they expected something major enough that they had their ducks in a row to get legislation passed quickly.

And as someone else mentioned, if nothing shows up quickly enough, another "false flag" operation. Though actually I think it's probably usually easy enough to instigate someone somewhere in the world to do something wildly threatening. So you just don't stop them, and maybe turn a blind eye to a few of their fumbles. (E.g., see all the advance reports on 9/11, including reports by the FBI about pilot training in the US that didn't involve landing.)

It's quite rare that an actual false-flag operation is necessary. A bit of provocation and instigation by agents in place is generally all that's needed. (This, however, doesn't mean that they never happen. Sometimes someone wants quick results, or wants to be seen to be taking action.)

It's probably that they've decided that only some of it is useful. And most of the rest they can contract out to corporations.

But even if you trust the accuracy of the quote from the CEO, do you trust the objective honesty of his statement? Note that I'm even considering that *he* may consider his statement totally honest (which would be unusual in a statement by a CEO).

If they had been paid, I don't think they could have won a lawsuit asking to be paid.

Logo doesn't make it difficult to learn a procedural language. Quite the contrary. But for an elementary school language I think Scratch would be better. (Think of it as a specialized subset of Smalltalk, designed to make animation easy.)

Science routinely re-evaluates theories. That's appropriate. And it doubts and tests purported "facts". Any organized system that doesn't do that is not worthy of being trusted. (Even governments do that to some extent.)

A possibility is that you had a very bad early experience with a bitter food. (Food poisoning?) You wouldn't necessarily remember it, which makes this hard to validate, but your attitude towards bitter foods could, essentially, be a phobia. It probably isn't worth treating even if this is true. (No idea how plausible this is, but it's just an explanation that occurred off the top of my head.)

Well, sheep's stomachs are hard to come by.

To be fair, while dark chocolate may not help you to lose weight, it's not all that bad a thing to add to your diet. You just need to remember to count the calories in it as a part. (My preference is unsweetened cocoa powder, which may not really be chocolate, I've never been sure.)

And I rather like chicken mole (my recipie, as I have a requirement that neither the chicken nor the sauce have added salt).

The problem is the people who think that chocolate flavored bars of fat are a weight loss aid. (Check out the carbs of unsweetened cocoa power, though. It's quite low.)

Also, I believe that, as with coffee, chocolate contains useful phytochemicals. Just as do kale, chard, and other dark green leavy vegetables. (I'm not so sure about most beans, as nobody seems to have been pushing them. Probably, however, kidney beans have them, as they are generally found in darkly colored vegetable foods...like broccoli and brussel sprouts.)

The problem here is thinking of trust as a binary choice rather than as a probability (float). Everybody, when they stop to think about it, realize that trust isn't all or nothing, but somewhere intermediate. But people often take shortcuts, and one easy shortcut is deciding trust as binary.

So, no, you shouldn't blindly trust an authority, but neither should you blindly distrust them. Each case needs to be evaluated separately based on the evidence you have on hand, and then given a temporary weight...which is subject to being changed when more evidence arrives. Unfortunately, this is not a good model for convincing people that you are correct, because you don't have the emotionally driving certainty. But even though that certainty is a great tool for convincing people, it's quite dangerous. You should immediately doubt whenever you hear someone being certain. This is a matter of self-protection, it's not that they are always wrong, or always malicious, often they aren't. But their goals are quite likely to differ from yours. And certainty is driven not be evidence, but rather by emotions, which are almost always self-serving in either a narrow or in an extended sense. (OTOH, life isn't a zero sum game, so their being self-serving doesn't mean that they are necessarily detrimental to you, your purposes, or your goals.)