We used to call them griefers. Now they pretend to have meaning.

This is very important. There's a light-year of difference among a typical scholarly article, a physics paper, a math paper, or some kind of incomprehensible humanities bafflegab that no sane person could comprehend. The former, if it's not too technical, should be readable to the average undergrad. The second and third might not be because there are so many specialized concepts and so much specialized language. The latter (and I'm not indicting everything coming out of the humanities, but a lot of it) is incomprehensible because it literally doesn't make sense.

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.

Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says.

The best comparison to Bitcoin that I've heard is the game of roulette. No one wins a dollar from a roulette game that wasn't lost by another player, with the house (the miners) taking its cut for runnng the wheel. Bitcoin is just one giant game of roulette. The money passes from one player to another. If you get rich, it's only because other people walk away from the game poorer.

And of course, more roulette games can be started by other casinos at any time, just as anyone can create a new cryptocurrency. Some of those games gain their own audience; other die out for lack of players. The parallel to cryptocurrency is exact.

But at some point, people have to realize that sitting at a roulette table isn't investing - it's gambling. You're hoping that you'll be luckier than the other players, and that more suckers will keep walking up to play. And fundamentally, I think that's part of what's happening to Bitcoin - with so many cryptocurrencies out there, it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that Bitcoin isn't money, and it isn't an investment - it's just gambling, except that it isn't as honest as a roulette table at Vegas. The Bitcoin whales manipulate the market to fleece the suckers, and will keep doing it as long as more suckers show up.

" dismantle the apparatus"

"also giving Trump a powerful tool "

I see what you did there...

And the Congressional comeuppance to Trump was to let the intelligence framework they have used since 2015 lapse.

They sure took him to the woodshed, huh?

If probably will get put back. They can't let go of the keys to all that data. And you know how they will use it.

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.

Did they take into account that most countries drive on the right? If you're walking the perimeter of a room counterclockwise, it might be because you are staying on the right.

What an utterly naive interpretation of world history you have. I can assure you, if you'd been a Jew being rounded up for extermination in WW2 you'd have a different opinion. Likewise, if you were Chinese or Korean being subjugated by Imperial Japan, you'd have a different perspective. There is such a thing as a "just war" even though you somehow ignore the concept. It's usually when your opponent starts the war and is hell bent on eradicating you and your way of life.

Alas, you sit there in perfect safety and comfort, passing judgement on those who sacrificed fa more than you can ever imagine so you could impugn their sacrifices.

Banned for who? And who's going to enforce this ban?

You have to remember any treaty (a) must have signatories that agree to follow it and (b) there must be a method of enforcement. If you lack either of these two conditions, the treaty has no effect.

Not sure how you think you could pull that off, but whatever.

Again...exactly how do you plan to accomplish this? It's not like Iran hasn't been firing missiles at our carriers this whole time. Yeah, it's a halfhearted effort by the Iranians, but what exactly do you think would happen to Iran if you managed to even damage one of our carriers, much less sink one? I can describe it thusly: the American gloves would come off. Iran would be plastered into oblivion via conventional bombardment, and there's very little Iran could do to stop it. Sure, we'd take losses, but the Iranian regime would cease to exist in totality. America has had this option available to it since day one. We haven't exercised it. Not because we couldn't do it but because we chose not to. Do not mistake restraint for a lack of capability.