Not sure what you're looking at. I am interested in the subject because I have a lot teachers public and private school in the family.

Most of what I see out there suggests to me there is essentially no correlation between changes in per-pupil spend and outcomes. If you go back to the 70s, you can't go much further back because you don't have a lot of comparable standardized test results before then, and stop pre-pandemic, what you see nationally anyway is educational outcomes are very flat even while (inflation adjusted) per-pupil spend jumped.

When you dig down to individual states, and/or mega districts (LA, etc) you mostly see that again outcomes stay pretty flat even in periods, even when major reforms (big increases in spend or cuts were made) even as you scroll forward a decade or on the outcome side to account for student experience.

From what I can see within a very wide-band of education spending, there is little impact on outcomes. Critics will find all sorts of exceptions but as I said in my previous post usually they end up being outliers to begin with. Sure you increased spending and scores did go up but it was in place where they were well below the curve to start with. Or people will say see see they spent even more money and scores dropped, but you look into and it was a place that was previously over performing, suggesting other factors probably are in play.

Yeah honestly British and American literature were some of my favorite subjects in high school because we got read things like Jane Eyre, Emma, Frankenstein, Gatsby, Huck Fin, Red Badge of Courage, etc.

All of those are great because the language is pretty accessible even for a contemporary audience and you can absolutely immerse yourself in any of them. Never felt like work..

Rand was a good writer, but she went off the deep end and forget that her audience was sophisticated enough to consume more than comic-book like obviousness and really would have like see real people integrating some of her philosophy into daily life, in a way they could relate to somewhat.

Atlas Shrugged kinda sucks..there is no getting around that. However i suggest people who don't like Atlas Shrugged actually read "We the Living", Rand herself contends that her philosophy was not fully developed and expressed in that book, maybe that is true, but succeeds where Atlas fails in that it reads like a real novel with characters you can believe, and experience some empathy for/with.

The funding inequities though are a distraction.

The underlying reality of MPLS is that they are compared to most urban education districts well resourced and have consistently seen real spending per student increase while conventionally measured outcomes continued to deteriorate.

The story of American public education for the last half century or longer is that real financial investment in education has consistently increased, and outcomes consistently been flat or deteriorating. Of course there are exceptions, but mostly in places that were already exceptional, in that they had especially poor performance, lack of funds, impossibly generous funds to replicate elsewhere etc.

This is a problem, and if we are going to solve it we need to recognize that money is not the driver here, the statistics are pretty clear about that. Unless and until edu-political-industrial complex is will to face the answers must lie in social, technological, environmental, pedagogical theory and practice, and elsewhere it will only get worse. It will probably only get worse because all of those things are pretty well wrapped up in our identitarian politic of the present era, so any sort of rational facts based discussion is impossible.

The difference between the tik/tok generation though and those before it is this.

I might not know how to the things described but if I wanted to know, I could sit and read long form document that explores those topics in detail and retain the information long enough to put it into practice. Even if I could not immediately store and recall all the minutia about some detail of post and beam barn framing, I could at least remember there was a discussion of the sub topic and roughly where in the material it probably can be found for review.

I am not confident some of the tik/tok generation is able to do this. If they don't get the dopamine hit from something happening almost instantly they lose interest. Its like when you buy a self assembly product that the first instruction is to read all instructions before starting, it is important to begin with the end in mind. We have a generation that has been so conditioned on just 'search it' and get instant answers they have no ability to study a topic. If you take the time to read 'Your Barn from pick and shovel to standing seams roofing" before you pick up that pick and shovel you might just be able to make some strategic choices, on the hand if you tik/tok every step, you'll be doing 'where do I go from here" every step and probably don't get as fine a result, and can't avoid costly mistakes.

Make it about morals if you like. However the reality is the data would have been gathered some other way. Harvested from AR see the product in your room, and navigation aides probably.

There is a bigger reality about data that I think every needs to come to terms with and integrate into the decision making at levels. That is

1) Any data aggregated and stored absolutely will be used for activities that fall outside the original purported intents for gathering the data, be that entirely innocently, because the stated intents were bold face lies from the beginning and every shade of grey in between.

2) The fact of running a connected anything more or less necessitates gathering of data. If its on the internet a lot of the activity are in someones logs somewhere at some layer of infrastructure for reason operational, legal, development, accounting, etc - no promises of 'we don't log' blah blah will really hold up. Again even honest well meaning operators might not really know what their PaaS provider really stores about that 'api gateway' and that might silently change for day to day too.

3) Anonymization of data is usually a joke. If you really obliterated enough identifiers on records to anonymize information it would no longer have any analytical value. "We anonymize our data, means we stripped off the names, addresses, and tax-ids also we pinky swear we won't try to join the dataset with any others that are likely to one again uniquely tie a set of records to definite individual we might even ask the people we sell the data to nice to not do that as well'

4) The value of the promise in three is worth about as much as the bytes it took to describe it. If the data is in any way interesting or valuable it will be sold, and the entities that 'own' copies will be sold, any restrictions on title to that data and even its providence will be lost, perhaps even intentionally using the transactions to launder it so that isnt subject to whatever privacy policy terms some idealist might have snuck in when the business was start up. If it is anything actually juicy nobody will be able to identify what party even has liability or get any court to agree to it, if it is data like name, age, and ssn everyone in the world already knows anyway maybe some class action against an Meta or and Alphabet might succeed so the prosecutors office can look like they helped with something everyone will get a check for $10 and 6moths of credit monitoring, the company will consider it a cost of business.

- The only real solution here is for the public to continue to reject things like flock cameras, and consumers to stand up and demand devices that work offline and without creating some kind of 'account' - fat chance either really happens.

Wrong,

The clowns are the ones screaming about Iran, while posting their stupid I stand with Ukraine stickers.

For Ukraine allowing Russia to continue attacking Ukraine is not ok, for everyone else, it is irrelevant because Russia is basically irrelevant.

Every bit of American treasure spent in Ukraine is WASTE if you're an American. Iran you can argue at least they have been interfering without other FP objectives.

I have opposed US involvement in Ukraine from the beginning. I don't think we should have supplied them with weapons or cash. It is a conflict that does not involve us, does not need to involve us and arguably American farmers and exporters would be better served by a Russian victory. Basically I don't give a f***k what happens to Ukraine or Russia for that matter really you could even extend that to the EU as long they remains customers willing or otherwise, America First!

Let's get real about war, something that we seem to have collectively forgotten in the First World since the cold war era began. War is where you kill people and break things for political ambitions.. On a very fundamentally level war is failure to resolve our differences a better way. It means people are going to die, people are going to be impoverished, people are going to be maimed, even if it is mostly folks that 'signed up for it' it is still f'ing terrible! We need to remember.

That said war can be justified, there are something that a society can collectively decide are worth fighting about. I say though if you are going to do that part of that justification MUST include a realistic path to victory and a willingness to pursue that path. if you ask me that is the real tragedy of the middle east from the late 1950s on, endless conflicts that always leave a bunch of lives ruined and nobody objects met in a way anyone can actually live with. All of that so it can happen again in another decade or so once a new crop of influential people decide they century old grievance is again greater than the faded memory of pain and loss suffered during the last dust up.

Ukraine has two possible paths to victory, either they inflict enough economic and domestic unrest on Russia to force them to abandon the effort or they bamboozle the enough of the First World to flush wealth down their shit-hole imagining Russia constitutes some real threat to anyone outside the former Soviet bloc. To that extent Zelenskyy seems willing to try both, in fact it is about the one respectable thing about him, in my book. I can't fault him for trying to strike targets over the boarder by any means he can, it is far more impactful than killing any number of Russian conscripts on the battle field ever could be in terms of actually ending the war, and with it the killing!

Which brings us to the other lessons of history here that our national leadership and the EU seem to missed, it is all these alliances and mutual defense agreements that have always lead us to the giant large scale destructive conflicts. NATO was a needed response to what the SSR implied, and the Warsaw was the explicit response to NATO formation. None of it has a reason to continue to exist. The sooner we abandon this sort of internationalism and let every mind their own damn business the safer everyone will actually be.

Russia is pretty much a joke. The entire Ukraine invasion has proven they:

1) Can't keep a modern navy afloat, let alone actively engaged with an enemy.

2) Can't keep an army feed and supplied beyond their own boarders, zero logistics capability

3) Can't muster serious troop strength, they are literally running out of conscripts, and even low quality ones like prisoners and men generally beyond their best fighting years in age.

4) Don't have the manufacturing and supply chain capability to produce replacement weapons and armor, and their stocks of old mid-century junk are even rapidly dwindling.

About the only thing Russia has is ICBMs that _probably_ work. They have exactly nothing that has even the slightest chance of intercepting or blunting the harm of the inevitable reprisal if they used them in anger, so they can't unless they are at the murder suicide stage rather surrender level of insanity.

There is no need to for NATO for the US not even as a staging area to counter Russian forces. As far as Western Europe is concerned, Finland and Norway can probably defend themselves and the Russians would run out of food and fuel before they reached anywhere else. Never mind that most of the EU "powers" have proven they are as incapable and decrepit militarily as Russia with their little Libya attempt. Any conflict will be a sad little show of hasbeens slapping at each other with drone strikes on childrens birthday parties.

The 21st century power struggle will be in the Pacific.

The problem with this approach is, it only works as long as someone does the checking. In practice everyone turns on 'safe update channel' and nobody actually tests the bleeding edge, ten days elapse, and the malicious code flows into the 'safe channel'.

It is like sending for help in a first-aide situation, you need to point at someone specifically, make eye contact and say "YOU! go get help" if you just shout 'someone get help' and go back to recuse breathing or whatever you're occupied with everyone will stand around on-looking assuming someone else is doing something.

I love Ruby, it is an elegant language and it has made great performance gains in resent years, but but bundler and the drama around rubygems is a really problem, for anyone trying to make commercial use of it. I hate to say it but if Ruby is going to survive it probably needs to find another major patron besides Shopify, that is willing take some ownership and investment in the outside the standard library supply chain. Bandages like this are not going to cut it, and pure community lead effort isn't likely to be able to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. Unless your project is Linux, Samba, Bind, Apache, level deployment scale it just does not work with the degree of attack surface something like package/module repository offers.

the answer to that one is actually kind of obvious, IMHO where do put large number of gold bars that does not result in people asking a lot of questions?

Safety deposit boxes? - I guess if spread it around enough separate banks, you have some privacy accessing the box (usually) but you still are not the only one handling it, gold is very very put much of it a given box and it might raise questions. One nosy bank manager might become a real problem quickly.

Bury it in the woods? - That works unless someone finds it, how undisturbed can make the local landscape appear? Did anyone say a local sheriff, game warden, etc get curious about that pickup beside the road?

Even transport carries a lot of risk, - what if you get pulled over, and an over zealous officer decides to search the car? Sure legally you might be able to get the discovery excluded from evidence but you're not getting the gold back..

Given it someone else? - Who do you that both won't ask questions, is dishonest enough to help you do something they reasonably can guess isn't on the up and up, and also trusty worthy enough to not help themselves?

40 million in gold without some documentation as to why you have it is rather a problem. Even you hammered it into look alikes of 17th century Spanish coins and claimed you found it diving off the Florida keys, a whole lot of entities are going to show up asking questions and asserting it should be theirs, just look what Mel Fisher went thru!

1000X ^^THIS

I am not say we never as nation need to conduct clandestine operations, but having an entire clandestine service is fundamentally at odds with the concept of representative governance, day light, and democracy.

The CIA should not exist. It should be shuttered and actually operations running agents and gathering intel should be returned to the DOD, and even if for reasons of operational security a considerable amount of activity has to be done off the record, the people running those activities should be far enough down the chain of command that when gross failures occur and are discovered there can be accountability.

IE some General officer can say "you dun fuk'd up, you're demoted/fired bring your people in and shut down the operation" vs our current system of congressional hearings where everyone shouts at each other, the people in questions just lie and evade knowing full well any hard evidence of their obvious purgery went in the shred bin already.

I guess that is what gets most fraudsters in the end. Seems like the guy made a career out of false claims and progressively bolder lies. Probably started to believe he could away with anything.

This isn't just taking shortcuts though this wholesale negligence.

Once in a while you hear such and such President/CEO of ACME never really graduated from Some Small University. They lied to get past the HR gate got hired as manager or director of Widget production 15 years ago where they were not an officer not responsible for signature on public records etc, later got promoted and nobody went back and checked up on stuff.

This though, the claims this guy made were shall we say rather remarkable for such a short career, service in multiple military branches, a graduate degree, pilot, managing a lot of people, etc.. A bunch of things that should have said to anyone reading the resume, this sounds perhaps a little puffed up, maybe I should check on SOME of this stuff which should have produced a few easily obtained artifacts. Obviously zero effort was made to verify any of it. Clearly nobody did any DD here not the hiring manager, not OMB..

I can't say I have run down every line on every CV of everyone I have hired but I usually at least go, ok says he was such and such at XYZ corp, lets look their about-us page on wayback machine, ok there is a picture of him a title that is near enough...so that checks.. oh he is a licensed PI, ok I can check the states website for that.. Then you just consider the claims, like ok says he graduated in 2000 and in 2003 was president of XYZ corp, again you check out XYZ oh fine it looks like they have about 4 employees and rented office in suburban Cincinnati; whatever, on the other hand if it is a 4000+ people and they have a XYZ Parkway named after them, you pick the phone and check that out.

Answer non of that matters. Almost all of those laws do not apply to the president, other federal employees, and in some cases legislators yes but the president largely is except for law that would prohibit him from trading based on his knowledge of confidential information.

He IS obligated by his oath of office to act in the interests of the United States, but he can profit from that as far as the law goes mostly.