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Comment Good time to sell to Donald (Score 1) 38

Ironically Iceland is green, and Greenland is ice, relatively speaking. Greenland was allegedly named by a shipping marketer trying to downplay the ice.

Here's a fix: sell them to Trump just before they start really freezing over. Since Trump doesn't believe in climate change, he'll deny he's being duped, believing the current cold is just random weather that will change back.

(Some argue he knows, he just wants stuff here and now to brag while alive, the future is Eric's problem.)

Comment Prepare now because (Score 1) 38

...not enough people or nations will do anything to prevent this. I'm just the messenger. There are basically 3 categories of people:

1. Those who care and are willing to sacrifice money or time to do something about it.

2. Those who care, but get distracted by other concerns such that they mostly ignore it.

3. Those who believe subject matter experts are liars or exaggerators, and thus ignore the problem.

Each of these is approximately 33%. Thus 2/3 (#2 & #3) won't do much about it, and this reflects leaders who happen to be charge of a nation at any given time.

If we get lucky, we'll figure out geoengineering without accidentally breaking something else. Otherwise we are hosed, figuratively and literally.

Comment Re:To what extent was it AI generated? (Score 1) 62

Most people who make a living off of AI produced music probably select from multiple candidate tunes made by the bot, and tweak the ones they like with prompts, and/or editing via old-fashioned sound editors.

Thus, humans are becoming vetters and tweakers rather than direct creators.

It's best if the bot generates the music as seperate tracks for each part (instrument & voice), as that makes hand-tweaking easier.

Comment Re:Teachers who fail kids look bad (Score 1) 133

I think that plays into it too. In many--most--school districts, teachers effectively have tenure--it takes serious malfeasance or illegality to get fired.

Years of bad performance isn't enough.

I think part of the solution has to be dramatically increasing teacher pay but you also have to make the working environment better.

Comment Re:Maybe stop graduating students who aren't (Score 1) 133

By weeding out the non-performers you can provide the (few?) others who can do the work and learn with an opportunity to do just that.

There is basically no, or very little, support for this position, and even stating it publicly would get you called a racist.

I just don't see a solution.

Comment Re:A lot of factors, but... (Score 1) 133

If you've looked at US PISA scores broken down by ethnic group you know that the US scores near the top compared to countries of primarily that ethnic group. So the whole hand-wringing about US schools being worse than other places in toto is not true.

Pretty much all of the US ethnic groups do better than those from the "origin" countries do. US Asians outperform East Asian Asians. US Euros outperform Europeans. US Africans outperform African Africans (though there is a less data for the continent).

The apparent problem is that the ratios of people at that level does not match the distribution in the general population. asians will be over represented. lacks will be underrepresented (by quite a bit).

The real problem is the expectation that those ratios should match, and that their NOT matching is an indication of "racism" (personal, systemic, whatever).

You chose to post this anonymously. I don't blame you. Even discussing the possibility of this is a hard thing to discuss. I don't see a societal solution.

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