No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple.

This is why I look sideways at the “Americans only read at a 6th grade level” statistics. Because technically speaking you should be able to derive this answer from the content of the story without having it explicitly laid out. Only, the standardized question adds so much incoherent fluff to the narrative as to make deriving the answer ambiguous at best.

As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event

This still feels like a trick answer, because “owls are wise” is a cultural trope not included in the story itself in any meaningful way.

You could argue the crow is the wisest for discerning the possibility of a trick. And then you could argue that wisdom is not synonymous with correctness to justify why the crow was savvy but still wrong.

You might argue that the moose is the wisest, because it was able to identify the moral of the story in advance.

You might argue the hare is the wisest, because it knew it could win a race against a pineapple.

But all of this would need to be laid out in an actual fully-written argument. It’s not the sort of answer you can pick out of a multiple choice exam. It’s the a debate you can have between peers where the analysis of the work is more valuable than the final selection.

Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol

The story is highlighted precisely because it is nebulous and confusing. I suspect the authors of the question intended it to create the illusion of a weed out question by guaranteeing a low success rate at selecting the answer.

But you could achieve the same results by asking “What side will a coin land on if I flip it?” a. Heads, b. Tails, c. The Edge, d. The Coin will not land

Since there’s no explicitly correct answer, you are - at best - going to get a roughly even distribution of answers between a. and b. Then you get to report up to your bosses that you’re filtering out a certain number of students as “failures” without interrogating why they failed or what you’re even testing them to do.

Not everyone has patience for kid friendly activities and some find them incredibly boring.

In my experience, kids love to imitate whatever their parents are doing. But they struggle to operate at an adult level. So you provide them with kid-friendly activities to bridge that gap with an eye towards full participation as they get older.

When my son was 1-year-old, I couldn’t put a baseball glove on him and toss a baseball around. But I could kick a rubber ball back and forth. I could get him to throw his ball into his toy box. I could roll a ball to him and have him pick it up, then two-hand throw it back. I’d do this with an eye to the future. And then he got older and stronger and more dexterous, and we could elevate what he tried to do.

I get that this isn’t the most stimulating for the adult. But, at some level, you need to enjoy being around your kids generally speaking. Otherwise, I’ll spot you that having kids is going to be miserable. At another level, learning how to teach is its own hobby and challenge. Experimenting with what your child can do is interesting. Reading about the next milestones and testing whether your kid can do them is exciting. Watching your kid improve over time is fascinating.

If that’s not for you… okay, fine. Maybe you take your kid to daycare and let them figure it out. And you just treat your kid like an appliance - fed, rested, healthy, etc. I’ll spot you that this isn’t very fun (on its face, anyway).

If I busted out a super violent video game or something they’d probably cool with it. It’d be my fellow counselors and parents who’d take issue.

I mean, I don’t see an enormous difference between Splatoon and Team Fortress. I got Sonic: The Hedgehog collection for my son, and we can play it without any serious fear of trauma (although he has thrown the controller a few times). You can curb the degree of gore and still keep all the elements that make an activity fun.

If anything my experience with kids almost softened my desire to get sterilized and cement my child free life.

More power to you. Just crazy to see people blot their own childhoods from their heads and insist you simply can’t have fun under the age of 20.

I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That’s when kids weren’t coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.

I gave my high school teachers fits because I’d sit in the back of the class and read my dad’s old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They’d be annoyed to see I wasn’t grinding my way through “Crime and Punishment” or “Great Expectations”, but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.

Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they’re getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been

• Larger class sizes
• Teachers with less education / professional experience
• Shorter school days / school years and bigger gaps in continuous education caused by the need to start work sooner

Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there’s one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.

It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn’t seem to match out with empirical evidence.

To Wit

Exploring the relationship between children’s knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes

If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.

People make money coming and they make money going. I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”, as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn’t really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.

If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You’ll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming “the kids today and their computers” is as good a vector for attack as anything.

Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.

It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing.

The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?

1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?
a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to

2. Who was the wisest?
a. the hare
b. moose
c. crow
d. owl

read books, go for walks, hang out with friends instead

He found the box of “Kingdom Death: Monster” board game figures I’d been sitting on since he was born.

Nancy Guthrie, 84-year-old mother of NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reportedly abducted from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026,

6 ‘Necessities’ Millennials Are Spending Money on That Hurt Their Finances

11 Things Gen Z Overspends On That Boomers Would Not Waste Their Money On

Young People Are ‘Doom Spending’ on Luxury Goods. Here’s Why.

Social media traps teens in cycles of unnecessary spending Consumerism is taking over the lives of young people, especially those on social media. It must be stopped.

Adults Im talking to are like

It’s funny, because I hear this from childless adults all the time, as well. More often than not, they’re complaining about being overworked (and underpaid) at the office. The parents I know more commonly complain that they don’t get enough time with their kids, bemoaning how much time (and money) go to day cares and after school activities, while they’re stuck working weekends or extra shifts to make ends meet.

I can’t remember if this is actually from IT or a knock-off from Cabin In The Woods.

I don’t think the average person is actually capable of guaging their level of satisfaction in life

One could argue they’re the only ones who can gauge it.

But there’s definitely a struggle to separate the symptoms of happiness from the conditions of happiness.

Like, if happiness is just a chemical, then OD on it and you’ve successfully maximized the raw score. But if you asked someone in advance if that’s how they want to live their lives, I don’t think you’d get many eager for it.

parents are overall less happy than adults without kids

Higher levels of stress, less money in the bank, fewer hours of sleep, yadda yadda. You could say the same thing about people who start their own businesses or take up a career in politics or do literally anything that’s taxing on the human body and mind.

Want to know how to live a truly carefree lifestyle? Take up heroin. Folks in an opiate haze are consistently ranked some of the happiest on earth.

And the post was about vibe and chill

It’s this sort of weird backhanded brag that tries to make a virtue out of self-indulgence. Might as well go full Gordon Geeko with it if you’re this far in.

I can also tell you that almost every parent I know, and I know many because almost everyone my age have kids, are super active and do all kinds of fun things with their kids all the time.

It’s always funny to watch a guy who has been a sports buff on the sidelines for half his life pick up coaching Little League baseball or soccer and come away with a totally different appreciation for the sport. Suddenly, he’s heavily invested in rookie year players, way more interested in the training camps than any of us have ever been, and saying the word “fundamentals” until our eyes have rolled out of our heads.

It’s incredibly cute and funny. Even as he says “Listen, my son’s not going to make it to the pros” he’s got to doubles back about how Tom Brady was a bottom of the barrel draft pick. Guy just loves his kid and loves what he does.

It’s always a bit surreal to see people insist “As a childless adult, I get to have hobbies while you don’t” when - as a childed adult - I find myself picking up hobbies I’d never even considered before kids.

My little guy stumbles on things and gets into them, needs some help, and suddenly we’re both neck-deep in a jigsaw puzzle or a TV series or a train kit or a pile of half-painted miniatures.

What “global backlash”?

Just another day of headline gore. Anything to get you to click past the headline.

Planned Obsolescence, baby! You don’t make money running the Panopticon if your clients aren’t constantly paying 10x the asking price to endlessly repair and replace your shitty TEMU knock-off surveillance kits.

The contradictions in the US are crazy.

We’re living in this enormous Panopticon - a massive digital fishbowl - for tracking and harassing and arresting lawful citizens. But you can kidnap an Olympics announcer’s mom, live on camera, and no one can find you. No one can catch you. Even as Ring runs “Find My Dog With AI” commercials during the Super Bowl.

Man: “Computer! Behave like a woman!”

Computer: “Beep boop. I am a woman. Here are things women say and do.”

Man: “Ew, gross! How could the computer do this to me? This is a conspiracy to hurt my feelings!”