I_Smell_Mendacious
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User ID: 1016
I_Smell_Mendacious
22d ago
students in third grade repeat the year if they are not reading and mathing at grade level.
You think this is too heavy a thumb on the scale? I disagree. Perhaps the timing does optimize for Federal money, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also provide the benefits it seems to. I agree with you that holding a child back is much better; I think 3rd grade seems like as good a first benchmark as any. I could be convinced earlier would be better but not much later.
I'm no expert, but it's an astonishing thing to accomplish in 12 years. If they can game the metrics this badly and not improve education outcomes, the metrics were useless anyway.
I_Smell_Mendacious
22d ago
Here's a convenient summary of the National Center for Education Statistics data on National Assessment of Educational Progress. To clarify, this does not include adult literacy, just students in grade school. Which I think is a better view of current education standings than adult literacy.
I_Smell_Mendacious
22d ago
And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals?
There is something fundamentally entertaining about an animal acting like a person to a vast swathe of humanity. Look at YouTube videos where a cat or dog is "talking" or using a doorknob. Or flushing a toilet. I don't personally get it, either, but YouTube view counts tell a compelling story.
I_Smell_Mendacious
22d ago
do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?
In the field of grade school literacy, Mississippi jumped from the very bottom to top 10 over the last 10 years, entirely due to their state government taking the responsibility of educating their children into their own hands. I'd be very interested to hear the arguments from people insistent their state can't be expected to educate their children as well as Mississippi does.
I_Smell_Mendacious
22d ago
In 2024, Alabama had a higher average literacy score than Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Texas, and California, to name a few. And the same or higher percentage of students at basic reading level. Who is getting a bad education because of dumb parents?
I_Smell_Mendacious
2mo ago
I don't think you're wrong on the broad impact on industry here, but your analogy falls a little flat for me. The difference in impact for poorly trained doctors versus poorly trained stock boys makes the idea of licensing requirements for one desirable and ridiculous for the other. It's possible the regulations on doctor training are overly burdensome and could be loosened without a corresponding increase in medical error induced mortality rates, but I'm not certain that's true.
I_Smell_Mendacious
2mo ago
I was under the impression that the AMA severely restricts the number of medical schools and the number of spots within those schools
The bottleneck in producing new doctors in America isn't the schools, it's the residencies. After graduation, all doctors go to some teaching hospital somewhere and serve a 4 year residency to learn how to actually practice medicine. This training program costs the teaching hospitals money, which is reimbursed by CMS. So in practice, the number of available residencies is determined by CMS; hospitals won't spend money out of their own pocket to train new doctors above and beyond what CMS reimburses.
The impact this has on healthcare costs, I don't know. I'm sure it's something, but is it a major component, or a drop in the bucket compared to other factors? I don't know.
I_Smell_Mendacious
4mo ago
you can't just go out and increase residency positions
This is the problem, but not for the reason you suggest, at least in the US. The issue is funding - training residents costs hospitals money, which is covered by CMS. Technically, I guess hospitals could fund residencies above and beyond their CMS allocations, but then they are spending money to train a future doctor that may or may not work for them. The financial incentives aren't there for hospitals to fund residencies themselves, so we end up with the number of residencies CMS is willing to fund. That number was mostly static for over 20 years, until Covid made stark how lacking in medical personnel the US is. So they've slowly been increasing the allocations over the last few years, but of course, at a much lower rate than general population growth.
I_Smell_Mendacious
5mo ago
Degrowth and environmental arguments will not be able to hold against the sheer awesomeness and vibrancy of space travel, I believe.
Anecdotally, I showed my wife the video of the Mechazilla catch yesterday. She was blown away at just how awesome it was. Previously, her opinion of Musk was "He's that billionaire that bought Twitter so he can troll people." After watching the video, she commented that if Musk was going to do amazing things like that, he gets a pass on all the Twitter trolling he cares to do. And she's not particularly "into" space flight and technology, it was just the sheer awesomeness that captured her attention.
I_Smell_Mendacious
6mo ago
I_Smell_Mendacious
8mo ago
Decimals upend people's naïve understanding that "more digits equals bigger number". My 6 year old still gets that confused sometimes.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada, I have no doubt that given the choice between trying to toe the line and interpret the rules reasonably, and dialing up their content filters to 11, they will choose to play it safe and do the latter.
Is there any safety to be had? If I'm the person tasked with dialing up the content filters, I have a hard time imagining what level of filtering would make me confident we were successfully toeing the line. And even if you think you have identified the line, you never know where the next line is until someone accuses someone else of crossing it. Better hope it's not one of your users that reveals the latest in offensive language/imagery/facts. Six months ago, who would ever have thought to be concerned about images of watermelons?
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.
The last time I looked into this, I came away convinced it was economics. Chinese men have (had?) a legal and cultural obligation to provide care for their parents that Chinese women do not. If you think you might only have one kid, it makes financial sense to insure it's a boy.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
if anyone knows the exact name of the type of chart in figure 3 here I'd appreciate it.
I'd call it a percentage bar graph, it's just horizontal rather than the more common vertical.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I agree, there are lots of vestigial taboos/practices in many (most?) cultures that don't necessarily make sense any longer and could be usefully re-examined. Some perhaps never made any sense; I'd be curious to learn how a practice like widow burning ever came about. But that old saying "you can't reason a man out of a position he didn't reason himself into" seems to apply here.
I am amused at the idea of the future society that looks back at current bestiality with disgust because our sheep shaggers aren't using protection.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I think in the specific case, it makes perfect sense that society developed a taboo against goat-fucking and not goat-eating. Widespread goat-eating is harmless, even beneficial if you lack other food sources; widespread goat-fucking leads to novel zoonotic diseases appearing. Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society. They don't need to be rational, they need to be effective in encouraging prosocial behavior and discouraging antisocial behavior.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I wonder if the drop in recruitment is impacted by the drop in college enrollment by young men? I might be a victim of selection bias due to my social circles, but a lot of the people I know that went into the military did so as a way to pay for college. If tuition really was a significant incentive that drove previous recruiting, a decline in the number of young men interested in college would see a corresponding decline in the number of young men interested in using the military to pay for college.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
My house increasing substantially in value actually makes me slightly poorer. My city decided they needed to perform an off cycle property tax evaluation, so my taxes have now gone up by a noticeable amount.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
Bill Clinton sold trade agreements to the Chinese in exchange for buckets of Chinese cash. The manufacturers sold their capabilities to China in exchange for increased profitability. The American Consumer got cheaper goods and thus cheered it on.
The only people that got nothing in exchange were the manufacturing laborers, but their careers were a sacrifice the rest of us were willing to make.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad.
I agree this isn't abuse, but it's definitely concerning behavior. An adult human being that gets sad to the point of crying because they were told "no" when they asked someone else to do something for them? Apparently on a regular enough basis to be considered a pattern of behavior worth discussing? If this person isn't lying to themselves (or Scott) about their motivation for crying, they have the emotional fortitude of a 5 year old.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I’m hoping in the longer run also that I might lose my cravings for these things a bit as my palate adjusts.
That has been my experience, particularly with alcohol and ice cream. I don't crave them as much as I did when I would regularly over indulge. And these days, when I do indulge, it's to a much less degree. My body just won't tolerate the quantities I once found enjoyable to consume.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
get down on your knees or get flat on the ground with your hands out to the sides. Do you consider that humiliating? This is done to minimize the subjects' ability to put up effective resistance. It's to decrease the likelihood that they have to fucking shoot you!
I never have been in such a situation, but I imagine that I would in fact find it quite humiliating to be forced to kneel or prostrate myself in front of my assailants. The fact that they are (presumably) insisting on it to assuage their own fears wouldn't really factor into my emotional reaction.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
What's eerie is the increase in politicians now being so elderly
America is more elderly across the board now; median age continues to rise. I suspect if you managed to gather the appropriate statistics, you'd find there is an increase in age in most professions. Barring a few where physical capability is a requirement.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
There is an axiom in certain strains of Western feminism that male lust is inherently dehumanizing. That the male (lustful) gaze objectifies any and all women towards whom it is directed.
This academic paradigm has filtered out to the masses in various forms. Young men have all been exposed to the message that their sexual desires are in some way problematic and expressing them to women is in some way harmful to those women. "It is disrespectful to have any sexual desire for your female colleagues." is an unsurprising belief to come out of that environment. It obviously isn't a true belief, sexual desire and respect aren't actually linked in our psyche that way, but it's probably a useful belief in the post metoo era.
I think grade level should be a measure of academic ability rather than age. Obviously, there will be some correlation between age and academic ability due to brain development; also obviously, some kids will develop slower than their peers. If other states are just passing those kids along because they think grade level should measure time served rather than academic achievement, yes that will obviously harm them in comparison to states that don't do that. But mostly because they are pretending they've educated these kids to grade level when they haven't. If Mississippi 10 years from now has measurably better educational outcomes for their high school graduates than they did 10 years ago, who cares if some of the graduates are 19 rather 18? Gaining an actual high school education by 19 (or 20) seems vastly preferable to being cut loose at 18 and functionally illiterate.
Mississippi's success implementing the obvious strategy of making students repeat material they haven't sufficiently mastered strikes me as evidence other states are doing it wrong. Maybe some of that effect is illusion based on gaming the metrics we use to measure success. But it's such an obvious strategy that has resulted in such success that I strongly doubt there is truly no meat on those bones.
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