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Comment Re:It's not really greed at that point (Score 1) 311

The most obviously applicable of those are the eligibility rules for SSI, which changed the definition of "public assistance households".

And what makes you think I'm on SSI? I've said repeatedly that I'm retired and am on Social Security, which is completely different. To be a tad more specific, I'm 76 years old and will be 77 by the end of the year. My VA compensation has nothing to do with that, as none of my disabilities made me stop working and all of them were declared Service Connected after I retired.

Comment Re:Is Ohio shooting themselves in the foot? (Score 1) 96

They're a warehouse filled with equipment racks and when something fails a person is sent out to swap parts. They employ at handful of people.

I'm long retired, and the only job I had that included a data center, it was right across the street from where I worked, so I have to ask this: when something fails in the typical data center, how long does it take on the average for somebody to get to it and swap in a new box? And, do they have some spare boxes up and running so that somebody can just switch things over to it in a few minutes and worry about replacing the bad box later or is that service just down until the box gets replaced?

Comment Re:Polls don't vote (Score 1) 222

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Comment Re:The problem is arseholes. (Score 1) 103

And what would you say if there was a heavy rain storm or dense fog? Would you still say that he should be driving at 55 mph even though that would be outrunning his headlights? Just to remind you of how dangerous that can be, I'd like to point out that that was what caused Titanic to ram an iceberg back in 1912.

Comment Re:It's not really greed at that point (Score 1) 311

Is that missing an end sarcasm tag? (IE: DOGE comes to mind)

No. Social Security is so ingrained in our culture that even if some politician were foolish to try to abolish it, Congress would never pass such a bill. There are just too many senior citizens dependent on it, and we tend to vote, especially when our livelihood is at stake. And, now that we don't have a draft, people have stopped hating the Armed Forces and started thanking us for our service (even if we served in a campagn they hated at the time) making things like the VA and its compensation to those of us who didn't quite come home completely healthy are heading for rhe same status. It probably helps that most of our disabilities don't show unlike the many WWII vets with missing limbs because those would make it a bit too clear what our sacrifices were. And in case you're wondering, none of my disabilities are obvious, but they all affect my day to day living.

Comment Re:Like A Crypto Billionaire (Score 1) 311

Yeeees and no. It matters in terms of loans he can get from banks. A trillionaire gets an awful lot better deal than anyone else.

So although he cannot liquidate a trillion dollars, there's a decent chance he can borrow at exceptionally low interest rates enough to do pretty much whatever he wants because he has the moniker.

Comment Re:Even a trillion dollars can't buy self esteem (Score 1) 311

It's not hard to be morally superior to a childish self-righteous socipoath.

He's not bright, he's not clever, he IS abusive, and he is exceptionally rich. However, only an idiot equates "rich" with "better".

I would say more than half of Slashdot can match or exceed his intelligence. And that's despite the fact that Slashdot has attracted pet rocks as users in recent years. Actually, truth be told, it's because of that. Back in the younger days of Slashdot, I'd say 95% of the regulars were smarter than Musk.

All Musk has is money. And I can understand you envying that. But here's the thing. Smart people don't talk their company's value down. Smart people invest their money. Musk throws it around, such as buying Twitter and destroying the userbase.

Musk is not your friend.

Comment Re:It's not really greed at that point (Score 1) 311

If for example any of us was even the slightest inconvenience to Elon Musk he could just phone up whoever is employing Us and order them to fire us and they would and then we would be blacklisted and become completely unemployable.

I'm retired. My income consists of Social Security and Disability compensation from the VA. Who could he call that could fire me?

Comment Re:On a related note - castles (Score 1) 156

When my mother was a child, any child who was displayed left-handed traits was considered possessed and had their left hands restrained.

My mother started school a little over 100 years ago, and was left handed. As was normal in those days, the teachers tried to break that "habit" and make her right handed like the rest of the class. When her mother heard that, she went to the school and told them that if they didn't cease and desist that barbaric practice RIGHT NOW she'd take Mom out of school and teach her at home, with the result that she was the only left handed student in her class. As the desks in those days had only a small writing surface on the right side, she had to learn how to write in a rather unusual way, but learn she did, with a very clear hand. I've heard that a similar "education" is part of what caused George VI's speech issues, but that's just speculation.

Submission + - College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read (futurism.com)

schwit1 writes: In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.

"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.

More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

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