NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
Outside of the companies that are charging for access to their model, it seems few even have monetization plans. It feels a lot like early days of Facebook or YouTube where we're just driving growth and we'll figure out monetization later.
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
Does your wife not seek you out for opening too-tight lids on jars?
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
Well there's an important distinction in that one is pursuit of competitive greatness and the other is entirely inwardly focused.
Though perhaps we split the baby and make transition a competitive activity. If you're on the varsity squad, which means you've put in your time and are able to trick a panel of judges into believing you're actually the gender you identify as, you get access to the best equipment and medical interventions.
If you're JV, well good for you, here's a used dress, a Party City wig, some Maybelline, and a couple of balloons.
Parents could rest easier if they could take a look at their kid and know that even if they were susceptible to some dangerous ideas, there's no way they could physically pass as the opposite gender. Or, you just know your kid doesn't have the grit to actually make it to varsity even if they have the figure for it.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Districts also have professional development budgets that firms are competing for.
In my district every Wednesday is an early release day so teachers can participate in professional development. This has got to be the only job in the world where 10% of your time is spent on training and you only work 9 months a year.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
I think the person you're replying to is referring to the whole language approach to reading. The popular implementations of this eschew phonics entirely, and instruct kids to use only context clues and pictures to figure out what word is on the page. The "Sold A Story" podcast dives deep into the origins of this and its many failures.
It's a great podcast, highly recommended. Among other things I learned that even this topic is culture war. George W. Bush's push for phonics based instruction was resisted hard by educators, apparently because it was coming from W.
Also very revealing in how much of education is driven by trendiness and personality cults. A dumb fad like Reading Recovery can damage a whole generation.
NewCharlesInCharge
17d ago
Well this has been an impossible problem for a long time, at least as long as Byzantium deployed its first generals.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
Maybe the Trump team knows they have a malfeasance case in USIP sponsoring overseas violence other intellegience agency shenanigans.
If the board members stay fired, they keep their secrets.
If they press the issue, then Trump is forced to show his cards.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
Not deporting a high profile person openly advertising their illegal status sends the message that you can be shielded from deportation by becoming a pro illegal immigration activist.
NewCharlesInCharge
19d ago
The Department of Education doesn’t tell states, districts, schools, colleges, or any other institutions how they have to educate anyone. But it has always insisted that they try.
Off the top of my head:
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Title I funding incentivizes concentrating impoverished students in great enough numbers to qualify for the funding. There’s a cliff where the funds just go away. I’ve seen this play out when our district was redrawing school boundaries, it was the top priority.
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Dear Colleagues
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Making funds contingent on keeping kids in or out of the proper locker rooms
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Throwing ESSR funds at districts that almost universally used them to fund new permanent programs and then begged for more funding when the always-temporary funds expired
There’s just a ton more strings attached funds that lead to administrative bloat and generally incentivize schools to chase things that aren’t all that useful except that they get rewarded with funds
NewCharlesInCharge
19d ago
It's the perogative of the executive to conduct foreign affairs, with explicit carveouts to Congress for the approval of treaties, appointment of ambassadors, and declarations of war.
For example, the normalization of diplomatic relations with China was executive action, both by Nixon and Carter.
So it is within the President's authority to say "I recognize Tren de Aragua as a competing government engaged in civil war against the internationally recognized government of Venezuala. And I further assert that they are sending agents to invade our territory."
I suppose this would also open up to all of the gang members to prosecution under FARA.
NewCharlesInCharge
20d ago
I guess the first priority is making the site self-sustaining.
NewCharlesInCharge
20d ago
I think the “ghost city” narrative may have been built out of ignorance, perhaps deliberate, of how China redevelops its land.
In the West cities tend to scale up one project at a time. Typically a single property, sometimes an entire block when the footprint of a building necessitates it.
In China they raze and rebuild entire districts at a time. Imagine San Francisco deciding that the Tenderloin was due for redevelopment. They move everyone out into temporary housing. They flatten every single building. And they build an entirely new set of streets and buildings.
As construction nears completion you have what appears to be a brand new yet eerily depopulated city. There might be a few buildings coming online but residents move in slowly. Perfect for Western media to take pictures of and within bounded distrust represent as a newly constructed city sans residents.
NewCharlesInCharge
21d ago
The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.
That’s quite a leap. The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X.
When people leave the app they aren’t consuming your ads and might not resume using your app for many hours or days.
Elon found himself with an unprofitable company and took a lot of drastic steps to get to profitability.
This is also parsimonious with Elon’s own recommendation for putting links in a reply. They don’t want people bouncing directly from feed to another surface.
NewCharlesInCharge
23d ago
At least in my state there is financial incentive for districts to classify kids as special needs. They get more than double funding for each such child, though that amount diminishes as you climb above 16% special ed students: https://ospi.k12.wa.us/policy-funding/special-education-funding-and-finance/special-education-funding-washington-state
The penalty is a percentage multiplier applied to the total amount of extra funds, and it's possible to lose funds. There are two tiers of special ed students, one that pays out a 112% bonus, students who spend > 80% of their time in general ed, and another that pays out 106%, for students who spend less time than that in general ed.
In either case you start losing revenue at about 58% special ed. Well before that you'd be losing money since you'd need to actually spend some amount of those funds on special ed services.
Would not be surprised if 25% is the real break-even factoring in the need to spend on services.
NewCharlesInCharge
26d ago
I don't think it's clear that American foreign policy has been, in the long run, to reduce nuclear proliferation.
If I were a leader of a country contemplating a nuclear weapons program I'd look at the examples of Kim and Qadaffi.
America made a bunch of noises against North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons, and has imposed sanctions in response to its success. But in the end this appears to have secured North Korea against military intervention.
Contrast with Qadaffi, who on his own accord negotiated to end his WMD programs in consideration for normalizing diplomatic relations and lifting of sanctions. He was rewarded with what was a likely color revolution that resulted in a knife in his ass.
So do you want to be Kim or Qadaffi? The winning move seems to be to develop your nuclear program in secret, or under very heavy fortification, so that it can't be preemptively destroyed. Then once you have your nukes, the West will leave you alone.
NewCharlesInCharge
27d ago
He’s always been a bit of a heel on Twitter.
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
I’d assume some basic competence in mapping influence networks. They’d certainly know of the rationalists, and if so would know of SSC, and if so would likely know of this place.
Imagine you were tasked with knowing about Internet culture circa 2005. You’d certainly know about the Something Awful forums. Though I guess this place is more like FYAD. Or the piracy forum spinoffs.
NewCharlesInCharge
30d ago
Decent odds, maybe 50% chance Vance is here. Doubtful on Putin. Would be unsurprised if Russian intelligence used this forum as a source of intelligence on exploitable culture war topics.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
You could argue that they don't truly believe it because if they did they'd also treat those seeking abortions as they would someone attempting a murder, but that's just arguing that they're insincere or inconsistent, not hyperbolic.
I think most women seeking abortion lack the mens rea to properly call it murder, they've been told all their lives that abortion is "healthcare," "just a clump of cells," and many other slogans that distract from the reality that abortion is ending a human life.
The doctors can be presumed to know better.
Were I writing the laws I would make a distinction between someone in this mental state and someone who knows full well that they're taking actions with the express purpose of killing another human. You'd have to default to treating all offenders as ignorant, letting quite a few off with punishments less than what they deserve, but the "shout your abortion" types could be justly punished as willing murderers.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
At least at my job, which is a large company but not government large, people generally know who the CEO's lieutenants are. If one of them asks for something directly, beyond verifying it's not a phishing attack, and unless I needed to push back because I knew it was going to break something, I'd just do it and send a note to my manager.
Email is almost never used here, nearly all comms are internal chats on our own platform, so phishing is pretty unlikey.
And if the CEO or his lietuenants wanted to look at all my emails, they'd just ask the department responsible for that, without any need to justify themselves. They can also look at everything on my phone, they can even view a live stream of my desktop.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Near where I used to live we had an intersection where three corners were gas stations and the other corner was a 7-11, no gas.
It's a four lane divided road. The gas stations on the far side of the intersection, where one could take a right after passing through the intersection, and then take another right to continue on the same route, have always had the same branding and ownership.
The one gas station that was on the near side, where you'd have to exit and be immediately at the stop light, would change ownership every couple of years, and eventually failed completely.
Traffic gets very backed up in this area, and I'm guessing people didn't want to deal with re-entering with a line of cars that wouldn't be kind enough to let them in. Just a few seconds further would take you to a station where eventually traffic would get blocked by a red and you could re-enter without depending on the kindness of strangers.
That property sat unused for about a decade, reportedly because of the great expense involved in neutralizing the underground gas tanks to meet environmental standards.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
That expectation doesn't exist in the private sector. The boss is expected to have access to everything you do on company devices.
If Alphabet wants to import all of Waymo's email comms for training Gemini, they have that right.
Or if they suspect employee X is barely or not-at-all working, they can dig around without needing to check with the employee first.
Maybe it would make sense to place limits around criminal investigations, but not giving the employer carte blanche to view the data generated by their employees on company devices is just hamstringing the employer's ability to manage its employees.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Requiring a response violates the Privacy Act (congress makes all sorts of rules that limit the executive in various ways)
This seems too absurd to be true but it's apparently not even the most absurd bit of this law. The federal government is restricted from collecting PII on its own employees, which includes mere names and email addresses, without it being necessary to accomplish a purpose authorized by law or executive order.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
It was their union that negotiated the contracts to set up these incentives.
If you’re looking to cut budgets and have one class of employees that will be difficult to terminate and another class that are essentially at-will, of course you will focus on the latter group.
FWIW I’m still getting plenty of recruiter chatter as a backend / infra engineer, but that’s with about twenty years experience, half at FAANG. I’d say a plurality of the reachouts, when the end employer is identifiable, are in the financial sector.
Though yeah, it won’t be long before I’m managing a team of AI agents, and then eventually an AI is managing a team of AI agents that replaced me.
I don’t know what to tell my two year old career wise, I’m focused on giving him a good moral foundation first. He has signs of being the kind of student I was, so I think he’ll probably figure it out better than I could. My exposure to upper class jobs was almost all via television, so my ambitions were to be either a doctor or lawyer. I had considered computer science as a fit for my natural talents, but Newsweek convinced me that was a dead end industry and all the jobs are moving to India. Then I spent about a week in a hospital with a serious injury, decided I didn’t want to spend any more time in a hospital, and chose a major suitable for law school.
And then ended up as a software engineer anyway.
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