It is the same - by middle school, the kids are expected to mostly do it on their own, but they receive homework from 1st grade onward, which means that for the first five years, parents are expected to work with the children. Even in middle school, parents will help the children if they don't understand something.

The reason this is so complex is that education is now a significant and high-stakes gatekeeper for economic participation. I think we need to move beyond throwing our hands up and saying "Oh well, this is really hard, since we can't make it good for everyone let's do nothing".

How would you prefer a classroom for your children be set up? One where each child is *given* a minimum level of education, with the resources primarily devoted to those who will benefit the most from them (i.e. the smartest, most engaged)? Or one where each child is *brought to* a minimum level of proficiency, with the resources focused on bringing the lower-performing kids to the median?

Your answer may be different depending on how your children are affected, right? If your kids are deemed "not the smartest/most engaged", then you're going to be ticked off that they're receiving a phoned-in level of instruction while the teacher fawn over the "achievers", right? But if your kids are in the "achievers" group, you may say "why should they be held back from their full potential"?

The answer is likely that we need to stop treating education like the Hunger Games, and fund it at levels so that there isn't a scarcity of resources.

One way we could close this "homework gap" is to fund a secondary set of staff which would act as both child care and homework helpers. Most parents work until 5pm anyway, so there could be a period of time from 2:30pm to 5:30pm where the kids mix together some unstructured play/social time with some snacks and some homework help. It could be voluntary - if a parent wants to be the one who helps their kids with their homework, great, pick up your kids early, but if the kids stay there until 5:30pm, then the expectation is that their "homework" would be completed.

We have boring classrooms and teachers because we have decided that we need to precisely measure the efficacy of both teachers and school districts via standardized testing. In my city, which is perpetually at the low-end of test scores due to high poverty, teachers *cannot* vary from the lesson plan. In some ways this makes sense, because it handles students who move around the city (and thus switch schools). But it is robotic and cookie-cutter.

Why does this testing exist? Because conservative doctrine is that 1) teachers are lazy and bad and must be held accountable, and 2) urban [read: minority] kids are lazy and bad, and must be held accountable. Oh, and grading school districts as A-B-C-Fail is the only way to redline in the 21st century (compare school district ratings to real estate prices - you will see premiums of up to 100%).

I sent my kids to a private school precisely because I wanted to escape the standardized testing. They got an education from creative teachers who were mostly excellent, and who also wanted to escape the drudgery of schools that were driven by standardized testing.

For all you coders out there, imagine a job where every task you had must be solved by consulting the manual that tells you how to solve all tasks. How fun would that be?

It should be obvious to anyone who has younger school-age children that results from homework and after-class assignments depend mostly on the parents, not the children or teacher. All schools stress "parental involvement", and many of these assignments need much of that to be completed. "Parental involvement" is one of those gatekeeping things that many charter schools require to keep out "those kinds" of kids - the ones they know will lag behind.

I can't tell you how many hours I spent with my children, at the kitchen table, helping them understand and practice their assignments. This probably occurred through about 6th grade, when they were then able to handle the task on their own.

I think it depends on the type of worker. If you're a worker who generally takes assignments, gets some clarification, and then delivers, then working from home most of the time is probably just fine.

If you're the type of worker who gets into a creative process via discussion, then working from home is probably less productive. It's hard to draw on a whiteboard, it's hard to read the room to see who likes what you're selling.

I think there's room for 1-2 days out of the office per week, but as more people are out, the chances of scheduling meetings goes down rapidly.

This smacks of a heavy-duty PR campaign to me. Does Apple actually have Apple-owned factories? I thought that Apple "designs" things and then sources the work to third-parties like Foxconn.

Yes, I thought that the Priv was a great design. Full screen slab phone, with a slider keyboard. I would have kept using it except that I had quality control issues with two of them.

My first Priv's side button stopped working, so I couldn't turn it on. I that with a second Priv, but with that one the screen turned green after a few months.

I got a refund for that second Priv, and I used it to buy a KeyOne, which was decent, but after a year the backplate came unglued and that made it super-annoying to hold. Then it just slowed right down and hung every time I tried to use it.

I then bought a Key2, which also isn't bad, but the keyboard space bar stopped working properly after about 6 months. I'm getting a replacement shipped to me, but it doesn't seem like there is another Blackberry on the horizon right now, so I'm soon going to be stuck typing on a piece of glass rather than a keyboard.

I think the difference is in the individual intimate psychological matching of the false messages.

If a candidate runs a mass-media campaign that says "my opponent voted to kill dogs", the opponent can address this with a similar mass-media campaign that refutes it, and can also call out the original candidate for lying.

Facebook essentially allows a candidate to tailor a secret message to people, whereby the opponent may never even know that he is being lied about. The candidate will give someone whose life revolves around dogs the anti-dog message, and someone whose life revolves around parrots an anti-parrot message.

The scale and precision of the psychological targeting is the problem.

I've been trained to *never* plug a rogue USB into my PC, since this could introduce malware, etc.

> It began with the liberals in charge of the media acting according to their own biases without realizing they're acting according to their own biases in the same way fish don't notice the water.

The lack of support for a biased position is not itself indicative of bias. Your argument implies that there is no such thing as bias because there is effectively no such thing as the truth, and that nothing is settled and that it is valid to challenge anything and everything, even if doing so gums up the works. That is why we are still debating whether women belong in the kitchen and black people belong on the plantation. That's insane, and if you can't recognize its insanity, then you're taking a position of chaos.

At least recognize that, and recognize that it is the behavior of a two-year old child.

Yes, I agree, that is the precise problem which has caused the split. The determination as to which of those stories gets raised in importance is based on your existing world view, and it is a matter of opinion as to which one is more important. I think a true journalist or media organization would have standards in place, and would strive to portray each story factually, and equitably, not through a political lens. Media should not strive to conform their stories to specific world views. And that is what happened for years and years.

I will give my political opinion here though - I do not believe this to be a a "both sides" problem. It is a problem that specifically began with conservatives, and the path they took is what brought us here to this fractured world. Conservatives repeatedly made the claim that because the existing media was not framing things through a conservative political lens, that this made traditional media anti-conservative, and thus liberal.

This meant that if a news organization did not highlight the shit out of an illegal immigrant killing someone, they were painted as biased by conservatives, even though the person's immigration status had no more bearing on whether they murdered someone than their height, weight, or religion.

This is where objective truth began to break down, where everything became debatable. A considerable number of people still believe that it is a DEBATABLE point that black people should be segregated because they are inferior, and a too-large number of people who don't agree with that position will still take the position that by not agreeing to debate that point, we are violating some free speech tenet.

By making everything debatable, by questioning every fact, they have set the stage for this era, where there is no objective truth - whereas there once generally was. Again, with exceptions, since nothing is perfect.

Yes, from time to time, there have been examples of professional/mainstream media either making big mistakes, gross errors in judgment, or even deliberately pushing agendas. The scale and scope of those instances is infinitesimally small when you compare it to the entire body of journalistic work, and an ecosystem of marketplace regulation served to chase out the worst offenders.

This is not the same as social media based "news", which has convinced many, many people of things like QAnon, windmills causing cancer, anti-vaccine, chemtrails, Pizzagate, and a whole litany of other things, the likes of which have never happened via traditional media. In many (though not all) cases it has done this deliberately, as a form of propaganda.

The two things are not equivalent, and the downfall of the player that tries to play by the rules in order to make way for the player that cherishes no rules is not something to celebrate.

My claim - if you read my words - is that "They were seen as generally ethical because they actually were ethical in almost every case.". Does that mean perfection? No. But lack of perfection to a standard isn't an argument that standards shouldn't exist.

> No longer can they control the discourse and mood of the people.

Let me fix that for you: No longer can they EXCLUSIVELY control the discourse and mood of the people due to the barriers to entry.

The discourse and mood of the people are now able to be controlled by anyone with enough resources and will, and it is happening from behind the curtains, with results that are bad for the people. So eliminating the barrier didn't eliminate the control, it eliminated the regulation ecosystem of that control.

> And whether you agree with what's "allowed" and what isn't, the very proposal of a corporation pretty much dictating public opinion is a terrible idea.

Here's the problem, as I see it.

Pre-social media, we had professional media companies - ranging from the large to the small. They, more or less, operated under generally agreed-upon rules. (one cardinal rule was that you do NOT run a paid story as if it was written as a news story, another is "don't print blatant lies or even gross misrepresentations". More on that later). They were seen as generally ethical because they actually were ethical in almost every case.

They were entrusted with presenting and filtering the news accurately and objectively, and in many cases, trying to eliminate spin. This made them de facto gatekeepers. They did a pretty good job of it too.

The rules started to bend with Fox News (originally envisioned as GOP TV), which took the position that "the mainstream media is made up of a bunch of liberals, so we're going to tell you the *real* truth". It's a whole other debate as to whether their premise was accurate or bullshit, but it is beyond debate that Fox presents a conservatively-slanted view of "news" that is supposed to be "the real truth".

Since Fox started, conservatives pushed this angle heavily, deliberately discrediting the "lame-stream media" incessantly. Now, it is "conventional wisdom" among many, even most people that "mainstream media" simply shouldn't exist - that the gatekeepers were somehow keeping us from the "truth".

That set the stage for blogs and social media. News that is produced by individuals - no filters, no gatekeeping. I admit, it sounded great to me too when I first thought about it. Combat any media bias with more media that present your side of things.

But there is a huge, huge problem with that model. It is too susceptible to fraud and lies. And in fact, it lends itself to fraud and lies because the entire false premise is that the more "mainstream" media is, the more likely it is to be corrupted or "fake news". The smaller players are lionized despite their hidden agendas and lack of standards enforced by reputation. The larger players are demonized because they are "corporations dictating the public opinion".

In other words, people believe "Tyler Durden" of ZeroHedge *more* because he's telling them stuff that they can't read elsewhere. It doesn't occur to them that they're not reading it elsewhere because so much of it is bullshit propaganda.

This allows all kinds of kookiness to pop up in society. QAnon. Pizzagate. Chemtrails. Because you can always find a squad of people who truly believe that stuff, and now pose as "media".

I don't know where we go from here. We are living in a world where debate can't even occur because people refuse to agree on actual FACTS, because they are trusting sources that repeatedly tell them that the facts are fiction. There is no transparency. There are no standards.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms pretend that they are the media when it is convenient (they scream "you can't censor us, we're the media!"), but then they conveniently say they AREN'T the media when people call them out on the bullshit that appears on them ("hey, don't blame us, we're just the platform!").

In doing so, they are, in effect, violating those cardinal rule of media, which is "don't run a paid story as if it is news", and "don't print lies or gross misrepresentations".

So now we're left with a country that implicitly trusts anything published, particularly if it confirms what they tend to believe, and no mechanism to counter that. Some blog prints something zany, the New York Times could debunk it, but in doing so makes people more likely to believe the zaniniess as truth!

This allows large players, bad actors, and even foreign governments to manipulate our consciousness.

So while it may seem bad that media has become "more democratized", in reality, this just means that we now live in an ungoverned era of chaos in the media.

It's kind-of like the narrative of the Avengers movie - people come to think that the Avengers are bad because they fear their power, so they want them gone - allowing a truly evil power to come in unchecked, and unstopable.