Teachers were never not Democrats. It's been a Democrat institution from the start, due to the close Marxist affinity and the predominance of women in the field.

So many logical fallacies in there, buddy.

If you want these things, then you will pay for a good public education.

This presumes that "good public education" is being funded with tax money. It is, conclusively, not. It has in fact been getting significantly worse - which is why people are opting out of it.

Do you want educated neighbors?

No formal education is, in most cases, better than bad formal education. I'd rather my neighbors not be stupid but think they know something, which is what the last 50 years has produced.

Who you can hire for your business? Who will have enough income to purchase your product? Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment?

There's no evidence that education can elevate someone over their inborn genetic potential. You've either got the building blocks for intelligence or you don't. See also the last several centuries of 3rd world "enrichment" that's been carried out by one means or another - education, charity, etc. - of places like India and Africa. I'm sure you can look up average IQs if it's of interest.

Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment?

I can hire a home schooled person, then? Because this criteria definitely doesn't fit your average public schooled individual.

Who will know how to make healthy choices for themselves and for their neighbors (you)?

Yes, the Food Pyramid, D.A.R.E., and "Sex Ed" had a fantastic impact on society's wellness trajectory - I'm sure we can all agree on that, right? (This is sarcasm.)

Who will carefully consider and thinking critically about public issues and use that knowledge when they vote?

OK, now I know you were being facetious. There's no way you're talking about state schooled kids here.

This is the wrong approach. Perhaps it'd have been accepted earlier, but they've shot themselves in the foot due to their inaction over the grooming pedophilia groups that were operating with impunity - and seemingly, protection! - on their platform. It was brought to their attention repeatedly, publicly, and they did all the wrong things and did not address the issue.

Fuck them.

Thank you. I'll check it out and maybe buy it.

It means fewer cats died.

hard to dispute

TFA is for subscribers only. Not much good, is it? And, by the way, First Post!

works for spammers & scammers

Even a broken horse shits correctly twice a month. (Or something like that.)

I don't think a better Constitutional can protect a democracy against conflicts like the culture wars. Cultish demagogues will always exist.

The NVidia cloud isn't new. It's been around for 3-4 years now at this point and seems pretty mature. It also works far better than Stadia ever dreamed.

I was able to play through multiple games I'd purchased specifically for the purposes of playing them on Nvidia Now, because I didn't have a gaming computer but wanted to complete the titles (Cyberpunk 2077 and Mechwarrior 5). The 'free' tier was irritating with wait times, but was playable. The higher tiers were far better and other than a rare ISP-related stutter (at 80ms or so, no less), and it ran great.

This means it's definitely playable at the 30-40ms that a person would get on Starlink (which I later got, and tested, and it worked even better). $10/mo for a couple months seemed like a pretty fair price for something that enables gaming. It wasn't a great experience on hotel wireless, but that's barely ever usable for much more than email. Keep in mind, I'm not a 'gaming snob' focused on FPS or graphics so much as the gameplay and experience, so I'm sure there's some aspect there that I overlooked, but $30-50 for a winter of gaming beats $500+ for the computer to do so. I just used a Macbook Air.

And it doesn't work the way you think it does. It's basically like, from what I can tell, RDP specialized for gaming. You can play it from anything that can support basic framerates and uses remote rendering. The game dispatches and loads onto a 'thin' Windows client of some sort, and it integrates with GoG, Steam, and a number of other gaming services.

I really don't think all these datacenters will ever be built. There are always more plans and announcements than what comes to fruition. The only way so many datacenters will be needed (i.e. economically viable) is if AI is so revolutionary to the economy that it would affect our power consumption in very unpredictable ways, likely offsetting a lot of activity in meatspace.

I'm happy to pay taxes for a public education system that works. Unfortunately, what we have today is a system encumbered by too many administrators, hampered by unfunded mandates, exploited by public unions, and micromanaged from every level from (superfluous) department heads to district administration to state legislators to the federal government.

From 2010-2019, the number of administrators in public schools nearly doubled, while the number of students and teachers only went up by ~8%. Those administrators generally cost a whole lot more than classroom teachers. To justify their salaries (and their staff), they are always chasing the latest fads in public education, whether it's "social emotional learning," Chromebooks, "student support time," AVID, teaching kids to "analyze texts", abandoning math facts and phonics, or "diversity/equity/inclusion" programs, each at tremendous expense both in dollars and disruption. The amount of inefficiency and waste is staggering.

And that's just on the local level. State and federal mandates, or "money with strings attached," adds tremendously to the cost, while burdening the actual teaching. What have we got in return for these enormous costs? Just about nothing. Part of the problem is that, since it's a government program, all the political incentives are front-loaded, and there's little incentive to review what has been done, and to weed out what isn't working. NCLB didn't move the needle. Neither did ESSA. Common Core was a disaster, and Race to the Top didn't help, either. More standardized tests, and linking funds to test scores, only provided perverse incentives. But we are still operating under the burdens they imposed.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in your post that public school is the only way for kids to develop a sense of civic engagement, social skills, new friendships, independence, meeting people from all social strata.

Certainly, a public school *can* be such an environment. However, over the past few decades, I've watched public schools (at least in the US) devolve into an environment where independence is quashed, left-leaning (or outright far-left) values are taught as doctrine, and students are given little time to actually socialize in meaningful ways, all while teachers' administrative burden (and our taxes to support it) continues to rise and core academic rigor is neglected.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint. The whole "socialization" argument is one of those urban myths that has long outlived any relationship with reality. In our local elementary school, the kids get a single recess per day. When they arrive for school in the morning, they are expected to sit silently in the hallway outside their classroom until the teacher lets them in. Their lunch period is so short that there's barely enough time to down their lunch, let alone talk with their peers.

My kids are homeschooled, but have one foot in the public school world for electives. As a result, we get to observe both sides, and what we see is a dramatic difference in social skills. For example, two weeks ago, at a birthday party, about half the attendees were homeschooled, and the other half were public schooled. The homeschooled kids were generally engaged, respectful, and having a great time. The public school kids? They could hardly utter a full sentence without someone blurting out "6-7!" and were actively trying to disrupt and ruin the party for everyone else, including the birthday kid. Individually, kids from either side can be great. In a group setting, however? I'll take the homeschoolers every time. They've escaped the herd mentality that a public school system engenders.

Because of the time efficiency of homeschooling, my kids have plenty of time for extracurriculars, free time, and part-time work. When it comes to "socialization," (however you define it), that part-time job, working around adults, provides tremendously greater value than being surrounded by 2,500 other hormonal, brains-not-yet-fully-developed teenagers who are trying to define themselves and understand how they fit in the world.