I agree it's hard to draw the lines... and I think even your "clear" examples aren't really Financially speaking
  there's little reason for any police department to do their own maintenance... except maybe in some place where there's literally no private sector garages.
Also jails could be fine... as long as there's adequate oversight... which sometimes there is and sometimes it's lacking.

I want to believe!

learning to read, in the context of this conversation, is about how to decode the text to words that are already known to the reader in the spoken language.

looking up unfamiliar words in a dictionary is a later, different, thing.

since win 10 was EOLed I switched to win11 with the free Explorer Patcher https://explorerpatcher.net/
to restore the taskbar to win 10 capabilities (multiple rows, small icon, don't combine)

I hope they throw the guy some dollars for making their crap livable. (ok and so should I)

"sound it out" is phonics... and the problem is that since the 90s many teachers/school districts DON'T say that because they were taught it's bad. and it got religious and phonics was banned as regressive... etc

and yes word recognition is fine later... but literally there are many people who can't up under this program who can't read a word like "realistically". I was shocked when I heard about this a few years ago, but it's a well documented detour much of the English speaking world took.

spelling is about writing and , tbh , it's largely a waste of time early on.
as an extreme example look at Chinese: thousands of characters ... very little correlation between character and the spoken word.
they've literally invented phonetic systems to teach people to read
(pinyin in PRC but other systems in Taiwan).

Japan similarly used their phonetic alphabet as a bridge to kanji. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Also in the US the opposite of "phonics" instruction isn't rote memorization in the classic sense..
it's a bizarre "learn to recognize whole words by reading picture books and guessing what the text is from the pictures"

it is pure insanity for everyone except the smartest kids (who actually probably reverse engineer phonics anyway).

Yes, i believe them. It's a matter of the basic set-up of the place of whether they use evaporative cooling or not. It's a whole different heat exchanger infrastructure. I mean, i didn't look into their building plans and approvals etc, but the claim is entirely plausible and it's a weirdly specific claim to make if it's not true, and as you said it's trivially proven if it's not true.

And also there's no firm accusation from anyone outside of the implication of the author of the article that the datacenter company did anything wrong.

It was the government that apparently forgot to read their water meters because they weren't automated during a smartmeter upgrade program. The company isn't accused of wrongdoing, isn't charged with anything, wasn't assessed any penalties or anything.

Stop with the racism crap. In the particular case of electronics and routers, whether they're designed and made in the US, in the PRC, or in Taiwan probably 50%+ of the humans involved in the design end development work will be Han Chinese people (or married to Han Chinese people)

there's no long term impact. it's just for construction.

read TFS which, this time, does include very relevant info.
  that shows the headline and TFA is mostly "bury the lede" FUD:

no no... please buy a new pixel 9/10/11.

it takes slightly better pictures and it only weighs 50% more than your current one. oh did we mention it gets a full day of battery... yeah, apparently that's notable again as it was 15 years ago.

the in-screen fingerprint sensor kinda sucks, but don't worry, you'll eventually forget the rear sensor was flawless for years.

Stuff like this seems inevitable to me, but various forms of 3d printing buildings whether out of concrete or other dirt+binder systems have been being experimented with for at least 10 years if not 20. Who knows if they'll ever achieve value parity with standard methods.

Though "standard methods" aren't an entirely static target either. Like i was watching some pumped concrete building of a high-ish rise building in Miami some months back and, while not robotic... it certainly included a lot of labor saving automation.

Dude, they may be hassling kids in the rural areas, but in cities on the East Coast youths (i.e 12 to 35yos) ride unregistered gas dirt bikes and ATVs with total impunity through and around traffic and have for at least a decade. Both as transportation and as cultural expression.

this article is from Cleveland area this week , but it's the same in Philadelphia and DC suburbs at least.
https://fox8.com/news/i-team/w...

Like with so many other things the government and cops will hassle the relatively law abiding with all sorts of technical and clerical bullshit, but ignore the gross violators of laws that have been on the books for years.

Most of the districts that COULD do that DID do that back in the 20th century. But there were arguments that the "slower kids" (C and D) above were just being "warehoused" and later "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and all that. Which led to general increased focus on the C and D kids and just leave the A and B as "eh. they'll be fine with whatever."

And the argument then further became that tracking is inherently discriminatory and that it shouldn't be done at all. Which is e.g. San Francisco removed 8th grade algebra back in 2014. because it wouldn't be "fair" to let some kids "get ahead".
(https://thevoicesf.org/san-francisco-flunks-the-algebra-once-again/ ). It's been a fight w/ parents ever since but the district is still winning.

Similarly in NYC they dropped admission tests for most of the public middle schools that had them a few years ago. And the magnet high schools (like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which probably have the smartest student bodies in the country) are under constant attack.

Yes, and no. I agree that everyone should be taught to read (with phonics and then for comprehension), as early as possible because it is a useful and empowering tool for accessing information and bootstrapping further learning.

However, there is a large variation in innate capacity to learn to read at all. To pick an arbitrary line: the large majority of 4 year olds won't be able to understand a YA level novel no matter how early or how intensively you started training them. But some of them will.
The real problem is that , again due to innate capacity, even some non-trivial level of 14 year olds will not be able to really understand that same YA novel.

And this difference in capacity is not obvious to most because of a lot of sorting in society. (e.g. the kind of people who even look at /., let alone comment, are people who to some degree are reading and writing "for fun" and they very likely work with and interact with other people who do that sort of thing. and it's easy to think that capacity and tendency is only a matter of effort or choice. but it's not only that. (even w/o getting into discussion of "clinical" dyslexia ) )

on ROI:
if you assume all the kids are relevantly the same EXCEPT for instruction, then yes.

but in reality, to use electric car analogy, the "quick" people have more total capacity and higher charging rate capability than the lower performers. say, modern Model S vs Nissan Leaf. If optimizing for time ... 15 minutes on a DC fast charger will transfer more miles to the modem S than the Leaf.

But the US system hasn't, lately, focused on the total miles of charge in the fleet (the class/school), but rather to minimize the number of cats with less than 50 miles available range. (along with the strong assertion that there are no leafs or model S-es only a fleet of idk Ioniq 5s )

(the analogy only goes so far since instruction is one to many, not one to one like car charging ... and other differences, but it works for this narrow example)