Gaashk
15d ago
I think that number includes 504s and BIPs (behavior intervention plans), and IEPs is closer to 10%
Gaashk
16d ago
Other than the beatings, some of the “social communication” classrooms for severely autistic kids are already rather like those prisons.
Gaashk
16d ago
There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.
I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.
Some articles from the past couple days:
- "Trump's Education Secretary Doesn't Know What IDEA Is and Special Needs Parents Are Outraged"
- "As Education Department Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff, Special Ed Worries Mount"
- The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.
I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.
Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?
Gaashk
29d ago
They have been converted to the civic religion of celebrating each other's sexual preferences.
Gaashk
29d ago
Moral foundations seems like a better fit for most of these issues.
The main area for both conflict and mistake is economics. Most people want to have a bigger slice of the pie for themselves and their fellow class members. The interests of the person who wants a cheap employee or servant and the person trying to get an entry level job are not the same. The interests of the person who wants government housing in a nice part of town, and the person who already owns a house in the nice part of town are not the same. Many people also have bad ideas about how to get where they're trying to go.
I used to be very into MBTI types, because as an ITP woman, I often felt like I needed an explanation for my personality.
So if this were actually an important project for your career progression, how would you self-report to get the best potential team?
I would probably be honest. MBTI is fairly values balanced, such that there aren't universally better or worse answers. That's its main value proposition, in addition to having a more constrained number of possible results.
The problem with OCEAN, from an employee's perspective, is that it's more threatening. Employers always want their workers to be conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable. Especially conscientious. So if it were an OCEAN test, I might try to look more conscientious than I actually am.
Adding: you'd want an extroverted feeling teammate if you're planning a social event.
Gaashk
1mo ago
It reminds me of Neil Howe's books about "the Fourth Turning." It's interesting and suggestive, but I'm not sure if it's accurate or not. That kind of pronouncement seems very suggestive, but also like it's impossible to figure out whether it's real or not until a decade or two later.
Gaashk
1mo ago
For a while, I was part of a friends group that included music hobbyists (though I am not one). People would write their own songs, and perform them with guitars and such. It was lovely! I would certainly welcome the return of more intimate, live performance spaces.
Gaashk
1mo ago
No, I'm saying that, oddly enough, the sorts of bios that highlight "not a man, a woman, no really," and stories that feature "tampon stashes" on the internet lately do not come from biological females.
I'm not saying I disbelieve you right now, just that this has been the case for several years now. This is literally the first time I've heard a woman mention tampons in relation to "actually a woman."
Gaashk
1mo ago
Strangely, those are the sorts of details that suggested trans to me.
(I have given birth to three children, could probably have another, and have no tampon stash)
Gaashk
1mo ago
Maybe boomer advice will become relevant again, and we'll start having to approach potential employers in person.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Interesting. My impression of advertising is that it was already substantially clogged, to the extent that it hardly matters if an email is personal or not, in fact a personalized message from a stranger is actually more suspicious than a normal advertisement, it's probably going to be some kind of scam.
I think my mobile phone company has some sort of spam filter, because the only unwanted calls I get are from the politicians in a jurisdiction I once registered to vote, so plausibly I opted into that.
Lately, I've found myself ignoring or marking as spam pretty much all business emails, and following them on social media instead. This is despite being the sort of person who reads blogs that are basically advertisements. I'll be annoyed when Google reviews, Amazon reviews, and Reddit posts get filled up even more with AI entries, but that was probably going to accelerate even without AI.
Gaashk
1mo ago
That's interesting, I had thought they were farther from automating meat processing. That does sound like a terrible job, anyway.
Gaashk
1mo ago
What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
Gaashk
1mo ago
It wasn't based on much, so I'm willing to believe I'm just wrong about that.
Gaashk
1mo ago
My impression is that she's a trans woman. Things like putting "and no I am not a man" in her bio, and talking explicitly online about her UTI, and the proportion of posts about gender vs everything else.
On the other hand, no, being offered "dick" three times a day isn't exactly a positive experience, even if accompanied by some other performances.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The Navajo nation is some 27,000 square miles for a population of 400,000 people; there's enough land, anyway.
Gaashk
1mo ago
My observation in New Mexico is that the federal government, while not very good, is still a lot better than the state at managing public lands.
Gaashk
1mo ago
It's not what I hoped they were doing, anyway. I'm a bit surprised that experimental contraceptive methods is even something that countries are still accepting from the US. South African TFR: 2.3 -- apparently they are already utilizing birth control adequately. Perhaps they should stop engaging in activities that spread HIV.
I'm not really sure how the executive office works, but my impression is that, somehow, they can't do that, the study in question just finds endless ways to file extensions, are forgotten about, and continue operating as usual until the next administration comes into power. My first guess would be that it's relatively hard to figure out what any specific program is actually doing, until they go complaining to the New York Times about it, since there are so many of them, and they have an incentive to look important but also non controversial.
Gaashk
1mo ago
That sounds like another entry into more bad things happening because USAID was doing things they shouldn't have been, in this case conducting medical trials.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I once lived in a duplex with my husband and baby for $500/month including utilities, but it was in a small town, and did feel like a closet. I could walk to work there, which was fairly nice. But I'm more confused about spending $1,000 a month on food for one person. We spend about $800 on food for two adults, two children, a baby, and two cats, and aren't trying all that hard. Like, we just ate salmon sushi with miso soup for dinner.
It might be worth a try, even so. Hand knitting clothing out of alpaca wool or something is probably still less expensive than most of the interventions in public education.
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