Because schools have been focused on "not-getting-sued", and to a lesser extent, "graph of standardized test scores go up and to the right", for a while now. In fairness, the outcomes we generally want - students with working-understandings of the world, life skills, problem solving, critical thinking, social awareness, self-awareness, and emotional stability - are all *very* difficult to quantify. It's even more difficult if we understand that every child has the same finish line, but different starting lines. So, we end up with the lowest-common-denominator of "effective and consistent regurgitation", which is simply the easiest thing to quantify and compare.

Well...that's because the real problem was both hard and easy to bury. Tech in the classroom works when it has a defined purpose, teacher training, tangential connections to existing curricula, and an underlying understanding of the principles the tech is intended to streamline.

Anyone who has ever seen a SmartBoard demo will attest to this - those demos are expressly designed to showcase exactly how new tech can supplement the teaching of old principles, and it looks *amazing* when the tech is shown in such a capacity. The problem is that the Smartboard salesmen can polish a 20 minute demo to a mirror shine, leaving teachers to figure out how to use the thing effectively in their classroom for six hours a day for 180 days...and it invariably ends up being used as a 'next-slide-button' for Powerpoints and an expensive projection screen for Youtube videos 95% of the time.

Tech in the classroom works well when there is an instructor expressly seeking to use it as an augment to existing lessons. Tech in the classroom stops working well when an admin signs a big check to a vendor, dumps a pile of Chromebooks and an instruction manual on a teacher's desk, and says "figure it out"...especially when it's paired with "you must use it".

Last piece of the puzzle: "it's what everyone else is doing" is a depressingly effective way to mitigate criticism and litigation.

Put it all together, and THAT's why everyone tried to do OLPC...and the backlash against it isn't necessarily stupid people sliding from "tech good" to "tech bad", so much as a group of average people - some smart, some dumb - saw the general shift of education in general, combined with sales demos and best-scenario case studies, gave it a shot, and now have their *own* data which indicates that the product being sold didn't yield the intended outcome, and responding accordingly.

This isn't a defense of the districts who pushed it, just the opposite - it's an indictment of the districts who could have avoided the whole problem before they burned millions of taxpayer dollars on a system with a fundamental flaw for which they did not adequately budget, and was obvious to any focus group of teachers and technologists who were given enough say to shoot down the proposal.

Sadly, here's basically the scoreboard:

--Google Chrome
--Microsoft Chrome (Edge)
--Apple Chrome (Safari)
--Chinese Chrome (Opera)
--Crypto Chrome (Brave/Vivaldi)
--AI Chrome (Comet)
--Firefox
--Not-Firefox-Firefox (IceWeasel, Palemoon, Waterfox, etc.)

And, while I prefer Firefox myself...the fact is that web developers hated the drudgework of having to work in anything but a browser monoculture...and Google wanted the browser to be an OS unto itself, which is why the browser has hooks into everything else - overwriting the firmware on a phone is something that Microsoft got no shortage of crap for making such a thing technically-possible with ActiveX, but when Chrome does it to update a Pixel in recovery mode, it's "innovative".

Thank God I've never had to live with a fucking HOA......

your dryer might be 50A and your AC 40A, but they rarely go at the same time. Same with the stove which has a 40A plug.

I take it you've never lived anywhere in the US south, or even the US west (AZ, parts of TX, etc)....from about April through start of NOV.

Having all of those on at the same time is quite common....especially any combination you want to make with AC.

My AC has clicked on and pretty much will not click off till first part of November....I'm in New Orleans.

Thankfully, my water heater, stove and oven and dryer are gas....but not everyone has the luxury of gas so yes, all those electrics can easily be on at same time, especially with a family of any size...and especially on weekends.

Congress (Article I) has passed many, many laws without veto from the president (Article II) which have withstood challenges in the Supreme Court (Article III) which have established policies of wealth distribution,

Err....exactly which many laws have given us wealth redistribution ?

"/me - Thumbs through my copy of the US constitution looking for anything in the limited, enumerated federal roles and responsibilities alingning with wealth redistribution."

Funny how most people who cite the constitution gloss over Article III like it's non binding.

If I recall.....Article 3 of the US constitution has to do with setting up the judicial branch...Supreme Court, etc.

I fail to see how that has anything to do with wealth redistribution, the subject I was addressing originally where you quoted me....?

"The asset tax is dumb. how is he supposed to pay that tax without diluting his ownership stake? "

That's the goal. The government exists for the benefit of the people, the people suffer when all wealth accumulates at the top. Massive ownership stake is not only NOT a goal of the government, it is the problem to solve.

/me - Thumbs through my copy of the US constitution looking for anything in the limited, enumerated federal roles and responsibilities alingning with wealth redistribution.

Hmm....On a state level, well I guess they can but thankfully precious few even think about doing this.

If nothing else, it ends up pushing wealthy people OUT of your state and overall you stand to have a tax revenue loss over a short period of time.

People are mobile you know.....

I'm guessing from your context...they had a figure 8 painted on the ground for you to follow?

Interesting....no such thing for me....just do one using your imagination for where the 8 was and how big i was,etc.....pretty easy that way.

Yup, often times, the smaller scooters are harder to keep up and precisely turned than a full blow motorcycle....at least I've found that to be true.

wouldn't that require taking and passing a motorcycle test?

Well, er....yes.

But why not if for an e-bike they're talking about licensing, etc those...for which a test would be required too.

And besides the motorcycle test is do a figure 8 in a parking lot and basically you're done....no big deal.

I recall, since I already had my drivers license I didn't have to take any written test just to have the motorcycle endorsement added to my drivers license.....road rules are the same.

And we in the US wonder why all you EU folks actually thing 6-8 hours is some sort of abnormally long driving trip...??

And I said I take usually 1 break in the middle...to refuel, pee and maybe grab a burger (possibly to go) and that generally takes all of 10 minutes....

We will never truly know how many dimensions the Chess game has.

This sounds nice in theory, but for quite some time now, that hasn't panned out the way it seems like it should.

Let's use a great go-to example - the finance department. Back in the 1970's, it was mostly-manual. You might see a calculator in the back room, but the ledgers were written by hand, the credit card slips all came from a knucklebuster, and lots of people had full-time jobs doing calculations and data entry and inventory management.

*all of that* is automated away now. Scan a barcode, shipping manifest of the whole palette is entered into the inventory system for delivery. When a purchase is made, inventory is decremented, ledger is updated, credit card company updates the statement in real-time, accounting ledgers are updated, bank balances are updated, information is downloaded into Quickbooks, the Quickbooks file is sent to the accountant, tax calculations - ALL OF IT is done automatically. From the farmer's market to the Fortune 500, *nobody* is doing their accounting work by hand anymore. An accounting firm with five accountants can handle the tax returns for ten thousand businesses annually precisely because of how much is automated.

Now...*some* businesses probably repurposed their bookkeeping staff to other tasks...but the bookkeeping industry today employs a tiny fraction of the people it did in the days of our parents. Did some businesses encourage the bookkeepers to help develop their business? Sure, some did...but most simply laid off the staff and "grew" through the reduced payroll.

AI will indeed help with some gruntwork areas, and it will enable the sorts of projects that used to be done with Excel macros and Access databases...but "capacity limits" haven't been a true barrier for a while. It's been readily possible to higher programmers on a "gig economy" basis over at Upwork for decades. More and more off-the-shelf solutions exist for niche applications as SaaS or OSS on Github.

But the real disconnect is here:

You'd be hard-pressed to grab a hundred people at random, have them think of the software they use regularly (be it desktop, mobile, SaaS, or embedded), and point to a time in the past decade where their software got an update and they were HAPPY. Exceptions certainly exist - most DJ software got the ability to separate vocals and instrumentals in real-time, which was huge for the industry...but for *most* people, *most of the time*, software has gotten worse, not better, because "new features" are far more likely to be implemented to benefit the developer, not the user. Try going to a website without an adblocker now; it's a 20MB cacophony of garbage surrounding two text paragraphs for most of the internet. Adobe Acrobat does maybe three useful things more than were present in version 9 from 20 years ago, yet it's five times the size.
I *might* agree that AI can help improve the process of software development by reducing the amount of time spent on gruntwork...but the overall culture of making software user-hostile has been a cancer on the industry that long preceded the availability of Claude and ChatGPT. If AI accelerates that, then I do think there will be a gradual shift in problems - some businesses will try to DIY their own software, which brings support and liability problems back in-house that were half the joy of outsourcing, but the desire for the in-house option comes from that software being too user-hostile over time.

Say it with me, now. As we all know, the infamous saying goes:

A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

It's really incredible how marketing departments can radiate amnesia like this with such proficiency.

Citing freedom as a reason to rally against perfectly reasonable common sense legislation is dumb

We, in the US, have PLENTY of sensible common sense laws already passed by legislators...actually probably too many currently.

But why not start enforcing those first...before you start infringing on the rights of people living and using their tools lawfully?

When it's a freedom to own weapons to kill children in schools, it definitely is. Those are the freedoms you like, right?

Strange, narry a single one of my many, MANY firearms have spontaneously gotten up a shot up a school....or harmed ANY human being or animal around me to date.

I keep them all loaded and chambered, especially the ones I carry concealed when out and about....

Hmm...you might just consider the problem is not the tool...but, and follow me on this.....but the human abusing or misusing said tool.....

And speaking of that...when, oh when...will we get:When it's a freedom to own weapons to kill children in schools, it definitely is. Those are the freedoms you like, right?

Sensible Rental truck laws?

Sensible Knife Laws?

Sensible hammer laws?

Sensible....well you get the point.

Most anything can be misused and can (and have been) used to mass kill people.....

Those small minorities of people shouldn't ruin a good thing for the majority of law abiding citizens should they?