If censorship is what’s being criticized, it’s no different.

Paradox of tolerance

I hate when censorship comes for people I do like.

I love when censorship comes for people I don’t like.

it’s just become such a nanny instance that jumps on everyone’s shit.

Admins are fighting a flood of instances and users more interested in getting attention than participating in the community. Consequently, you’ll have power users ballooning the front page with click-bait. You’ll have instances choke full of reactionary content specifically intended to bait a flame war. You’ll have spammers plugging their own brands or working on behalf of some third party. And you’ll have the odd bot-farm or other automated account that’s just probing the Fediverse for gaps.

“Ah, but the individual users can always block what they choose”

Sure. Technically. But nobody wants to wake up every morning to a front page that’s full of shit. The spammers can bloat your inbox faster than the individual can flush it out. So Admins who step in and do a little public house cleaning - the Nanny work you hate - makes the website cleaner and friendlier for lay users that pop in now and then.

Having a public energy sector would be beneficial in the long run and would reduce what we have to pay for it.

A well-run public energy sector, certainly. Idk what we’d end up with given the most recent rotation of people in charge.

The state does have an incentive to keep consumer costs low in a way the private sector does not. But state officials also traditionally do a bad job of maintaining and expanding utilities to match consumer demand.

The end result tends to be low end user prices at the expense of reliable distribution and surplus volume.

Is it easier to secure, monitor fewer, bigger reactors or thousands of* small ones?

A moot point when we don’t build new ones anymore.

But the big appeal of the molten salt reactor is that it doesn’t require continuous manual interventions.

Solar, batteries and long-range transmission infrastructure just makes too sense I guess.

Sure. Obviously.

But that’s WOKE, so we hate it.

Nuclear definitely has a role to play. Integrating SMRs into our global shipping fleet would eliminate the enormous waste and emissions of bunker fuel, for instance.

And areas that don’t have reliable sunlight or wind (far north/south regions) or that require high steady output in confined areas (large factories, urban centers, major metro arteries, etc) can see real benefits, relative to gas or coal power.

It’s a technology we should have invested more heavily in 60 years ago. Obviously, Texas will fuck it up. But that’s not an indictment of the technology, just the capitalist dipshits that run the state.

The school’s primary selling point is its “2 hour learning” philosophy which promises to give students their required education and prepare them for necessary standardized tests, AP tests, and the SATs in just just two hours of learning.

Real “Eight Minute Abs” tier pitch work.

Former Alpha School employees and internal documentation don’t disprove Alpha School students’ high test results, but show that students often have to study more than two hours a day, that they sometimes arrive at Alpha high school classes unprepared and below grade level reading skills, and that some students had to go back and fill holes in their education before they were prepared for high school level classes.

:-/

This is an enduring refrain with pilot program education systems. Your initial crop of students get bespoke treatment (to match the astronomical cost - $60k/yr is more than most colleges charge). Then their performance is tied back to the gimmick - AI, SmartBoards, School Uniforms, Montessori style teaching, Jesus classes - that’s rolled out to the hoi paloi at a cheaper price but absent all the personalized, expensive tutoring.

I think Nevada bet Texas there by about 70 years.

SMRs are a new scam needed because old nuclear scam has worn out.

Idk about that. Consider the Linglong One (ACP100): Developed by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), it is the first SMR to pass an independent safety assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2016. Construction began in 2021, and the core module was installed in 2023.

Definitely a challenge of materials sciences, but to call it a scam? Come on. Coal sticking around as long as it has is the scam.

Nonsense. We can just let the Free Market handle it

Sounds more like a tornado than a hurricane.

But also, you can fortify these underground and behind concrete in a way you wouldn’t for a Galveston Beach house.

it hasn’t been a problem since that event 5 years ago.

We’ve been spared any serious natural disasters affecting the grid during that time. No major hurricanes. No big freeze.

The worst event was the 2024 derecho, and that definitely knocked out power here and there. But it was high enough above the treeline to really wreck infrastructure at the ground level.

I’ll note that a huge increase in wind and solar capacity means we aren’t exposed to the same kind of economic pressure from five years ago, either. The '21 freeze came, in large part, due to gas power plants locking up when they were needed, because they hadn’t been weatherized. With less acute demand issues (thanks to new green energy) we haven’t been in a position where gas plants could casually wait for prices to spike before turning on.

In large minority districts of entrenched Republican enclaves

Really depressing to see what a wet blanket he became after he took the Letterman spot, especially given how much leyway Letterman had to fuck around with prior to his departure.

Some of Colbert’s best material is when he’s got nothing to lose. The last six months have been a breath of fresh air on that alone.

Banning something is a sure fire way to give it oxygen.

It’s a clever bit of marketing to queue this up and make a big stir and drum about being censored.

The allegations feel… thin? This is a primary race in a state that’s been sandbagged for Republicans for decades. But as a piece of campaign material, it’s par excellance. More people are going to see the clip passed around online than ever would watching it broadcast on a Monday night.

The problem Trump has in doing this type of suppression

I doubt this was anyone’s serious intent. Republicans pull this gag all the time. They deliberately try and trick the alarm for censorship and then scream ten times as loud “LOOK AT ME! I’VE BEEN CENSORED! CHECK OUT THE VIDEO THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE!”

Liberals (or, at least, this one guy fighting for his life in a deep red state) finally seem to have caught up to the game.

Brilliant bit of marketing to blare “We’ve been censored by the FCC!” from the rooftops, on the day the Texas primary starts.

Texas is a hell of a state

text book industry gets to extort students then it’s fine for the tech bros to do it now too.

Good thing nobody said that then.

teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.

They’re not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master’s degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don’t need a bachelor’s in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don’t need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don’t need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.

Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It’s the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.

the issue is the metricization of education

Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.

Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don’t look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson’s latest “Number go down / Number go up” announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.

By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.

not to mention the changing in parenting

You can blame “parenting” for a single kid’s mistakes.

Once you start blaming “parenting” in the aggregate, you’re inevitably full of shit.

The common denominator in these school districts isn’t “parents” and its absurd to pretend otherwise.

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.