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Comment Teachers are useful -- but at what? (Score 1) 140

As John Taylor Gatto suggests in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher": https://www.informationliberat...
        " ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
        Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
        With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
      All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith."

So most teachers earn their money doing well what it is teachers are supposed to do (as planned in Prussia in the 1800s when compulsory schooling was introduced to make Prussia a military power).
https://odyssey-fm.com/why-sch...
https://metropolis.cafe/2017/0...
https://dukereportbooks.com/bo...
        "The Prussian Blueprint
        In tracing the roots of American education, Gatto illuminates the foundational influence of Prussian schooling. In 19th-century Prussia, the state constructed a comprehensive education system to mold loyal, obedient subjects. The purpose was explicit: to instill uniformity, suppress individuality, and ensure that children would grow into citizens who followed orders. America adopted this model eagerly, not because it worked educationally, but because it aligned with elite interests.
        This importation was neither organic nor public-driven. It was orchestrated by a coalition of industrialists, politicians, and academic theorists who viewed schooling as a tool to engineer society. They believed in planned progress and social stability, achieved not through democratic participation but through controlled upbringing."

So, the big -- and usually unacknowledged -- issue is that what teachers (and schools) are supposed to do (turn kids into obedient dumbed-down low-initiative robots for industry and warfare cannot fodder) is no longer something our society needs (if it ever did) or wants.

Until people accept compulsory schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and are doing it very well, it is hard to have a productive discussion about changing -- or abolishing -- them. And likewise, it is hard to have a productive discussion about how educational computing should be used in schools when compulsory schooling has very little to do with education.

Comment Re:Apple will pay for this (Score 1) 51

Unless LLM become a dime a dozen. The Chinese have every incentive to do this given the Western companies fixation on producing the most expensive ones.

Regardless, LLMs won't help with many tasks, and they are only as good as their last model. So in any fast changing landscape, I do not see them doing well.

Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 2) 95

Also, our ancestors have been eating meat for thousands of years with no effect on the weather

That's a really big claim. You have not done the research or looked at the evidence to back it up. It's something you pulled out of your ass. Don't do that.

It is possible that our ancestors eating meat had an effect on the weather.

Comment Re:Good idea (Score 1) 42

It isn't just el Bunko's ties to Ellison and his sprog who owns Paramount/Skydance (the firm that fired Stephen Colbert on the ground that el Bunko ordered them to). Paramount/Skydance is backed by Jared Kushner and Gulf Arab oil money. The opportunities for el Bunko to accept "tribute" from this "deal" are nearly endless.

As always when el Bunko is involved, look for the trail of bread crumbs back to his pockets.

Comment Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score 4, Informative) 74

At least $100 Billion. The tariffs have raised "As of August 2025, tariff revenues since January 2025 totaled $149 billion" (https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff-revenue-tracker-how-much-us-collecting-which-imports-are).

This is much less than la Presidenta's claim of $22 Trillion (last we heard, inflation tends to raise his estimate week after week). For comparison, the entire U.S. GDP for 2024 is $29.184 trillion (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp). We cannot trust any numbers put out by la Presidenta's regime, they are likely "massaged".

For the continuing damage: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/res...

Comment Re:it's all innuendo (Score 1) 40

The retraction note is all innuendo. It doesn't cure any actual wrongdoing, nor the actual basis of it's suspicions. just that "questions have been raised".

Meanwhile, studies that were quoted by grifters in the first true post-truth trial of Monsanto causing cancer were all ghostwritten by greenie hippies.

It's also not like it's the _only_ study of glyphosate safety. There have been 13 reliable mouse studies since 1984 ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... ), that found no effect on mice in any reasonable concentration. But now the anti-glyphosate grifters are going to glomp onto this study and pretend that nothing else exists.

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