Too many schools are underfunded and too many teachers are overwhelmed with large class sizes, behavioral and disciplinary challenges, lack of administrative support and in-class assistance, and disinterested, unhelpful parents (who are working 2-3 jobs, often at night, and are themselves exhausted and burned out)

The US already pays more per student than just about any other country on the planet for education and we do not get the results.

No, the problem isn't money......

I think a lot of parents are home schooling to get their kids out of the classrooms filled with green/blue dyed hair teachers who are more concerned with indoctrination than education.

The pandemic opened A LOT of peoples' collective eyes as to what was really going on in classrooms that parents didn't have a clue about.

Encouragement of trans....grade school kids exposed to information on anal sex and how a boy can give a blow job were the most egregious examples....but just sets values that didn't set with what parents in general in the US want to impart to their kids.

the US population is generally middle of the road and you screeching green haired instructor is pushing stuff from the far left in many cases.

Parent's saw this and are putting a stop to it.

Frankly I can't blame them.

Journalists kind of suck at communicating science to laypeople, in part because journalists are laypeople themselves, and in part because they suffer from Dunning–Kruger syndrome and are too stupid to realize their their journalism degree doesn't mean their expertise extends to all areas.

Under the Biden administration, you'll see several phrases from the CDC that are more measured. Such as "a path forward" or other variations using the key word "forward". I don't know why anyone would pick up some random journalists, especially one like Maddow who has been more about shock titles and opinion pieces, over some sort of expert, such as an epidemiologist. I guess picking sides based on Left versus Right politics is just how some people's brain works. Forgive my harshness, but that's a stupid way to operate. Rather viewers/listeners should invest in weighing if someone is wholly unqualified to comment and doesn't belong in the discussion (with Maddow*, she rarely belongs in a serious scientific or economic or military discussion).

* Maddow's partner is a wonderful woman and I enjoy her art (photography but abstract?)

Annoying and overly literal puzzles are my generation's jam. And really any generation going at least as far back as those who read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or the Oz books.

I still haul Zork out once a decade and play at least the first one. I rarely have the energy to power through the second or third. I also occasionally pick up Return to Zork (1993) which is more of a full motion point-and-click game. A genre that really has no equivalent today and is perhaps more obsolete than a text adventure, as the low-res videos and acting have not aged that well.

No, but 30 years ago people thought I was being paranoid, a crank, or just being difficult (troll, contrarian, etc)

..WOW...

Someone woke up on the dystopian side of the bed this morning.....

Are you suffering from memory loss or "brain fog" ? I'm not sure how months of telling people to wear a mask, stay home if they are sick, and get vaccinated translated to 100% cure in your head.

(effectiveness of last year's vaccine show it to be high in children, 79% and lower in adults, 34%. source: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/downl... )

Make whatever claim you want. But if it's not supported by evidence then you're just flapping your gums.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there is a faction that wants to intentionally erode the public's trust in government services. To dismantle a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And replace it with a very different sort of government; one that eschews pluralism, reserves individual liberty to those with power(money), and establishes a rigid hierarchy with a unitary executive at the top.

For the most part, when the media talks about "math" in primary and lower secondary school we're talking about arithmetic. I remember learning Calculus as a teenager, and it was confusing and not intuitive, but once I got it there was very little more I needed to do. That was a completely different experience compared to multiplication, where I had to drill with flash cards before I had enough of the fundamentals in order to do arbitrarily large multiplication problems, and later it proved to be a vital prerequisite for long division.

Not everything stuck with me, despite practice. I'm really slow at polynomial division, I don't have the basic process down in my head and I use it so rarely that I tend to have forgotten steps when I eventually do need to do it.

I think by the time someone enters high school, they ought to have a basic skill in arithmetic. They don't have to be the fastest at it, but it's going to hold them back in the sciences if not mathematics.

Do you want a nurse that can't add 0.15 mL and 0.35 mL ? Processes in a hospital avoid putting people in the situation of doing arithmetic on the spot, but it tends to happen and people screw it up.

I'm looking at this website from Linux right now because it is HTML/CSS rather than a custom client for AOL or Prodigy or whatever.
Also PDFs work on Windows and Linux. And even calendar invites from my wife are working on my Linux computer (.ics).
Basically desktop Linux performs many (most?) of the same functions as a Windows or Mac in a compatible way. Different flavors of user interface (or whatever this is that the GNOME team calls a user interface)

Texas style all-meat chili is pretty good. But it is terrible at being a one pot meal.
It's all just some warped version of Mexican chili con carne. Which I never make myself, but do prefer over Midwestern chili. Some hot tortillas and Spanish rice on the side. It's excellent.
A few of the diners in Michigan serve something they call chili that is more like soup with bits of tomato floating in it. I like this too, but I will accept that it's not really chili but something else.

It can in some cases, depending on various factors like the codebase it's working with, the nature of the feature and how well you describe it.

You will often need to refine the prompts, or prompt it further to address bugs or things it decided to implement in a strange way. It also tends to work better with code bases that are smaller or more modular, and with code that was developed using an ai assistant rather than existing code bases.

You're right about it being like junior developers, it's good for getting mundane things done but does often need a lot of guidance.

A current generation LLM is not perfect and cannot replace a skilled employee, at best it can assist a skilled employee to do their work more efficiently.
If you understand this and have appropriate use cases, then it can absolutely be useful.

If you're trying to use it for something it's not suited for then it's going to be useless or even detrimental.

You can replace most of your developers once you have a mature product, just shift it into maintenance mode.

Any phone, shouldn't matter, should basically perform the same function in a compatible way.
It's like buying a can of kidney beans and then wondering if the brand you bought is compatible with your chili recipe. (that's right, I put beans in my chili. Because beans are CHEAP and my Mom wasn't going to buy two pounds of ground chuck just to make dinner)

Nobody is going to like this, but the secret to doing arithmetic: repetition.
You're not going to get it right the first time. And you're not going to remember it long-term unless you've been drilled on it so much that you've been in tears over it.

Math isn't natural for our brains, so it's rather difficult to learn at first, but everyone needs some basic grasp of arithmetic in this society. We're not hunter-gathers anymore, we have bills, taxes, and far more complex lives than we did 1000's of years ago. And we can't just sit in front of a phone and watch videos roll by and expect our lives to amount to anything. You learn by doing, and you get better with practice.