https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/

"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black

Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.

Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.

Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. My state is a bit of an outlier, in that our teachers ARE more lowly paid than national averages, but then my locality is one of the higher paying supplements to teacher pay.

Why do I say pay is a problem? I've seen what happens to many good teachers. They get burned out from having to deal with trouble maker kids who if they get disciplined or get bad grades the parents go ape shit with allegations of racism, sexism, abuse, whatever. They get burned out from dealing with helicopter parents. They get burned out from, in most parts of the country, being governed by elected shitty school boards. They get burned out because some miscreant has an IEP and a 504 plan and so his stealing from classmates and being constantly disrupted is considered a manifestation of his disability and everyone else just has to deal with it.

Good teachers have job flexibility. I've seen multiple _great_ teachers go to work for companies like IXL where their starting salaries are always higher than what they were making as seasoned teachers. Others go the administrator route and become principals, superintendents, etc. Others go to teach at private schools where the pay is often better.

What I would propose is basically 3 things:

1. Get rid of habitually low performing teachers--every year get rid of your worst teachers
2. Increase pay for high performing teachers
3. And the kicker that I have no idea how to do--allow schools and teachers to apply standards and discipline without fear of lawsuits.

Suck/not-suck aside, would you at least agree that it's as good as The Mandalorian?

Eyeball monster == Baby Yoda. So. Fucking. Cute.

The second movie, Aliens, also didn't have the mood of the first movie, yet was still one of the best movies ever made (IMHO! of course). I don't think the feel of the original is necessary in sequels, and might even be so hard to recreate that it's borderline hubris to try.

I'll probably watch it .. when I feel like doing nothing and thinking the presence of the xenomorph is a coincidence.

I think that is the best attitude one can take. The "domestication" of the xeno is the weakest part of this TV series, but OTOH, the inclusion of all the new monsters is part of what makes A:E so fun. The classic xeno is just one monster among many, now.

There are so many horrible ways to die. Show us more of them, Noah! ;-)

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.

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.

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).

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.

I attended a (public) middle school teacher meeting about two years ago. The 8th grade math teacher said "I am supposed to be teaching XYZ for the 8th grade statewide standardized math test. I can't do it. Around 1/3 of my students can't multiply two numbers. They don't know." (She went on in this vein--it wasn't laughing or flippant, it was a cry for help)

She didn't say 1/3 of her students struggled with some of their multiplication tables, or algebraic concepts, it was that they literally didn't know how multiplication works.

I used to quiz my kids every morning with short "head math" problems starting in K and 1st grade. I started simple "2+2" .. "5+5" ... "6+7". Eventually I added multiple steps "1 + 4 + 3 - 2" or "6 + 7 - 2 + 10". I did the same starting in maybe 3rd / 4th grade with multiplication tables.

One of my kids ended up being an academic high flyer. The other still, to this day, struggles with math. He somehow worked his way into an advanced math class, but he has to work his ass of in there for Bs and Cs.

I am very sympathetic to people who aren't mathematically inclined, but these problems are embarassingly easy.

So I have a serious question for you (this comes on the heels of me doing a deep dive on PISA testing results, and it honestly has been weighing heavily on my mind lately).

I 100% believe that socioeconomic factors are probably the single biggest factor in academic success.

Is there any possibility that average population-wide genetics play a role in academic success? (I very much do NOT want to use the word "race" because I think it's basically meaningless). Is it possible that, on average, Americans with a large Far East Asian genetic component perform academically better than, on average, American students with primarily Western European backgrounds? What about those with large sub-Saharan African genetic components? Etc.

The question really is--is it _possible_?

My answer is that yes, I think it's possible. I don't think academic achievement is the most important thing out there, but it's important.

And, if it's possible? What the heck do we, in a free and democratic society do about it?

It's bleak and dystopian to think about!

My oldest son goes to a high school on the other side of the country. It has an award winning Engineering magnet program. Every year multiple students from this school go to Ivies and other top 25 schools.

Simultaneously, ~55% of the school is poverty level, ~45% is low English proficiency, and about 30% of the students are considered habitually absent (meaning a minimum of 10 _unexcused_ absences).

My son is taking APs, very intensive engineering classes, and participating in multiple extracurricular activities.

In the same school building, more than half of the students regularly rank in less than the 30th percentile on both math and English end of grade tests.

What I commonly hear from teachers and administrators--if you're a teacher teaching classes of the poverty level non-English speakers, what good does it do to fail them? They're just going to drop out anyway. Maybe if you encourage the kids along, a few will get something out of it?

It's an awful situation to be in. The school has at least a dozen ELL teachers. The school offers pretty much all the standard freshman courses (English, US History, etc) in both Spanish and English versions. This drains so many resources from other parts of the school. The arts program operates on a shoestring and all the arts programs are constantly fundraising to keep the lights on.

The soccer team is damn good, though..

So everyone and everything is to blame except removing standardized testing as an admission criteria in California (2021), schools in CA being closed for in-person education for ~2 years due to Covid, and perhaps most importantly, California adopting a a radical new math curriculum that focused on equity and removing cultural barriers in math education. (See, e.g., EdWeek

Right, it's Republicans (all those nasty California Republicans who dominate state and local governments) that have put us in this mess!

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

With a president who solves an existential threat by finding the best expert he can find, and using his own formidable political skills and charisma to run interference for that expert.

Seriously, Comacho was a meathead, but Iâ(TM)d vote for him.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam didn't provide enough incentive to try to distinguish between humans and skin jobs, but now "AI slop" does? Ok, great!

Check the OpenPGP signature.

Unsigned? /dev/null.

Signed but no trust path? /dev/null

Signed and with a trust path? Can still be trash, but its claims to be of human origin, are worth taking seriously. If you find a problem (e.g. someone trusted the wrong person) then deal with that then.