roystgnr
8hr ago
he has no reading stamina
I stand by my previous recommendations, but after some thought ... it might be worthwhile to focus on stamina-building reading before worrying about quality reading. If my kids hadn't gotten into the habit of devouring guilty-pleasures series when they were younger, they probably wouldn't have been up for more thoughtful things to read when they were 10. "Can read at a high level" and "can read without noticing any effort" are two different virtues, and there are all sorts of voluminous book series designed to make sure kids develop the latter. My oldest daughter's favorite was probably "Warrior Cats". I think mine was "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" back in the day. Don't even sneer at comics! "Calvin and Hobbes" has something to think about at every level. "FoxTrot" was my kids' gateway to Star Trek TNG. Even "Garfield" (okay, you can sneer at this one, but sneer respectfully when around the kid) isn't worthless if it gives the kid motivation to binge read something for hours on end.
roystgnr
13hr ago
"Social Justice Warriors" gladly appropriated that epithet coined by conservatives
Citation needed? Last time I looked into it it looked like the phrase was coined by liberals and only much later appropriated by conservatives as an insult.
Apart from going old school and introducing him to the Heinlein juveniles, I have no idea what SF is out there for younger readers.
"Apart from using a jack, I have no idea how to hold my car up while I change the tire."
But I guess if the correct fix is one-time-use then it does make sense to ask what to move to afterward.
My kids all loved Heinlein, to the point that the little ones have demanded weaker (in my opinion) Heinlein like Orphans of the Sky first over better novels by other authors, and got more variety mostly via a mix of "my insistence" and "running out of Heinlein". I haven't let the little ones touch his adult-adult novels yet, but he's got one aimed at adults that was totally appropriate for kids: Double Star is a major favorite of theirs.
There are also some adult SF novels that are appropriate enough for kids with a little Parental Guidance (and/or outright censorship; there were a few books that I'd insist on reading out loud with the 10yo so I could do that, despite letting a 13yo read them himself). I'd have put The Martian in this category, though, and it's possible that some of my other suggestions are also too hard for a 10yo? From Heinlein, aside from Orphans, I'd say Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress really deserve context+discussion. From Weir there's also Hail Mary. (Artemis was so disappointing - a young-adult sort of story with inappropriate-for-kids text was exactly the opposite of what I wanted...)
The "Crosstime Traffic" by Harry Turtledove has a half dozen (self-contained; it's a series because it shares the same worldbuilding but there's different characters each time and no reading order is assumed) young adult novels that range from good to great. They're more educational than the Heinlein juveniles, too: hard SF of the "One Big Lie" variety, where aside from the sideways-in-time-travel all the worldbuilding is either real history or plausible-alternate-history from a PhD historian whose fiction specialized in that. With Heinlein there's always a mix of stuff like orbital dynamics working out on the dot versus "Total Conversion" (without antimatter) and "Martian canals" where we really knew better by the time he was writing and the last nails went into the coffin a decade or two later.
Someone's already brought up Asimov's short stories, which (if you pick the right anthologies; his later short stories were weaker) I agree with. Niven and Heinlein also had a few great short stories, and Niven's got a few shorter adult novels (World of Ptaavs, Protector in particular) that one of my kids enjoyed. Asimov's Foundation may be too dull for a 10 year old, but The Caves of Steel might not be. The sequels to that one get less age-appropriate fast, though, and even in the first book my daughter disliked the main protagonist.
If fantasy is an option too:
I loved Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents ... though none of my kids did. De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. They did like Mort, though, and haven't tried other Discworld novels yet.
I'd say that Mother of Learning would be the ideal way to build up reading stamina ... except that it has a slow start; my kids might have given up on it if I hadn't insisted they make it past chapter 4 first.
Oh, I almost forgot to bring up Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. Those answers seem "too obvious", I guess, but the former is probably what got my kids doing the most reading in total, and the latter took more than one of my kids from "reluctantly willing to let mommy or daddy read a chapter of something to them before bed" to "finishing hundreds of pages on their own because daddy doesn't read out loud fast enough" in no time flat.
IMHO the HHGttG series is really heavily front-loaded - if you just finish the first book then you've gotten 80% of the value of the series from 20% of the reading.
Edit: I also recall the first book being more age-appropriate than some of the later books, which may be just as important in context here. To be fair, I'm not 100% certain in either judgement about the later books; I've reread the first book within the last few years but probably haven't reread any of the sequels within the last 20 years.
roystgnr
16hr ago
Agreed, if you stick to the short stories and if you're careful to pick the best short stories (the I, Robot collection is a good place to start). I tried Asimov novels with each of my kids, and somewhere in between 10 and 13 seems to be where the first Foundation novel went from "too dull" to "fascinating" in general.
roystgnr
4d ago
Jobs where you're at your post for hours on end but only busy for a fraction of the time seem to be ideal for creative types too. I could swear I've heard multiple stories of authors who got their start while manning a hotel front desk during the night shift.
roystgnr
4d ago
if the tax treatment of the prediction markets were not so awful
Wow, this is interesting. I went to double-check this, because I just recently learned that some of my old reasons for ignoring prediction markets are now invalid (US bettors are no longer capped at $850, and big questions like this are now generally liquid enough to have O($100K) open orders within a few pennies of the market price), and it turns out the current tax treatment of prediction market gains and losses is:
Uncertain!?! Tens of billions of dollars per month of trading volume, rising fast, and as of August at least it wasn't even clear to professionals what category of income to use for the results? Not a single person at the IRS could be arsed to clarify?
roystgnr
4d ago
And the reason communism is bad is not whatever bullshit theory Marx and Engels wrote, it's all the killing, repression and poverty caused by its political implementation.
Ironically, the area in which Jews were grossly overrepresented was in communism that didn't descend into killing, repression, or (too much) poverty. They still had to steadily reform and unwind it (the bullshit theory is bad! economics' laws are safer to ignore than physics', but not by much), but it was creditable that they did reform and unwind it rather than picking out some Kulak-type groups or vague "wreckers" to scapegoat and making things worse.
Fascism is bad because Hitler tried to kill everyone in the world, not because of what an intellectual wrote in a book.
Central planning rationalized with "the weak are holding us back!" tends to have the same problems as it does rationalized with "the strong are oppressing us!"; in the end the main difference is who's in the most danger when the planners fail.
roystgnr
4d ago
But the vibes-based part of my brain says "you're rationalizing what you want to be true".
El-Sayed is up 3 points in the polls and over 70/30 in the prediction markets.
The only whitepill I can give you is that this isn't really a Michigan vote of confidence for El-Sayed. To the median voter a midterm election is just a weirdly confusing referendum on the incumbent president, and the incumbent president's approval margin in Michigan is now around negative 20. It's impressive in context that a Republican with a mostly-Trump-aligned record is only 3 points down.
roystgnr
5d ago
The latter point, in itself, does not prove a correlation between stupidity and criminality: there might be no correlation at all, and the ones who find themselves in prison are merely those stupid to get caught.
The effect size for IQ-vs-getting-caught is pretty huge, and it runs the whole IQ gamut, and it can't be solely selection bias. There aren't enough unsolved violent crimes for every IQ decile to be committing them at the rate of the lowest one!
There's got to be some selection bias, sure. I wonder what we could do to actually estimate how the discrepancy between "criminality" and "convictions" varies with IQ. Plot IQ vs "time and crimes elapsed before getting caught", then try to fit a distribution that would give us a "hasn't gotten caught yet" tail size to estimate? I doubt we have enough data. It would probably vary from crime to crime, too - e.g. how much of the lower clearance rate for property crimes vs violent crimes is "more violent crimes have a witness and are naturally easier to clear", and how much is "smarter criminals stick to crimes where there won't be a witness"?
Even a definite correlation between stupidity and criminality wouldn't necessarily imply a correlation between stupidity and evil. It's possible that smarter evil people tend to avoid getting caught, not by planning the perfect crime, but by realizing the expected value of the crime is negative (both because they're better at such estimation and because they tend to have more socio-economic status giving them more to lose) and just not committing it. Such people would still be evil in the sense that they'd do evil if they could definitely get away with it, but since they can't they just don't try.
roystgnr
6d ago
""When I think of a really rich man," says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be "discreet, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth." From the 1930s dates the flight of money from such exhibitionistic venues as the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue to hideways in Virginia, upper New York State, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. The situation now is very different from the one in the 1890s satirized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. In his day the rich delighted to exhibit themselves conspicuously, with costly retainers and attendants much in evidence. Now they hide, not merely from envy and revenge but from expose journalism, much advanced in cunning and ferocity since Veblen's time, and from an even worse threat, virtually unknown to Veblen, foundation mendicancy, with its hordes of beggars in threepiece suits constantly badgering the well-to-do. Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America. Now the rich must skulk and hide."
Paul Fussell, "Class: A Guide through the American Status System", 1983
I wonder how much of this is ignoring the effect of changing crime rates. The NYC homicide rate nearly doubled during the Great Depression, and although it came down again, any families scared out of their Fifth Avenue mansions could have felt pretty smug when homicide nearly quintupled in the 60s.
Other crimes you might have wanted to hide from, if you could afford it:
"Efforts to address the increase in prostitution, especially by juveniles, were derailed by the arrival of crack cocaine to Times Square in 1986. As a result, crime rates spiked and continued to increase through 1989. The addictiveness of crack made it an especially insidious drug, as users focused their energy and resources on scoring the next ‘hit’. Crack dealers, junkies, and the cardboard encampments of the homeless took over the streets."
(from the Times Square Official Website - imagine how an anti-NYC-biased description looks!)
I also wonder how much of Fussell's analysis has now been obsoleted by further changing crime rates. NYC homicide rates plummeted rapidly, back to "at least no worse than the Great Depression" levels, in the 90s, and then dropped back to the previous baseline in the 2010s. I've never been acquainted with more than a couple high-paid New Yorkers, but I get the impression that having a second home out in the countryside is now just a way to better enjoy days off with the kids, not a desperate attempt to hide wealth out of sight.
roystgnr
6d ago
Ancestry obviously matters (squibs are very rare, and muggleborns even rarer considering the large denominator, to the point that "infidelity" and "genetic mutation" might explain them all) but it might matter in a mostly trinary way. If there's something like a simple Punnett square for wizardry, with WW wizards and ww muggles and Ww squibs, then obsession with ancestry in the "don't marry a squib unless you're fine with half your kids being squibs!" sense would be descriptively correct, but obsession in the "Our purebred W alleles are better than their muggleborn W alleles" sense wouldn't be.
roystgnr
6d ago
This was once the subject of a major inter-faith debate. The priest's position was "Type AB-positive", because He is the universal recipient of all our souls. The pastor was a "B positive" person, because that's what the Good News means to us. And the rabbit was just a "Type O".
roystgnr
6d ago
those 'hundreds of bombs' were actually 8 standard propane tanks bought from a store
about a hundred
Wiki claims 99 bombs, including 15 converted propane tanks, but apparently only 4 of those were full standard 20-pound tanks.
just assumed that detonating those is a rather easy thing to do
Yeah, that's the "not all killers are capable of bomb construction" category. The strength of the tanks wasn't even a big deal until the second time the murderers tried to set them off (with other bombs and/or guns); the initial failures on those were just bad timers.
Digging into the details does make me have to retract the claim that "their biggest bombs could have had hundreds" of deaths. There were nearly 500 kids in the cafeteria when the bombs there were supposed to detonate, and there was a Sheriff's report claiming that "Computer modeling substantiated by field testing indicated that had those two large 20-lb. propane bombs detonated with a cafeteria full of students, most would have been killed or severely injured by the resulting blasts and subsequent fireballs." ... but that claim seems to be depending pretty decisively on "detonated". Even if the cafeteria bombs had gone off it seems to me that it would have been a conflagration but not a detonation ... at most! One of their other big propane bombs was supposed to be a "car bomb", but (when the bomb squad finally set it off; its timer also failed) it didn't do much more than blow out the car windows.
Are you referring to the pipe bombs they made earlier but did not eventually bring with them?
Some were left around as diversions, but Wiki claims they brought enough with them to be "throwing pipe bombs in several directions, including onto the roof" while outside, along with multiple separate pipe-bomb throwing incidents in the hallways.
I think those are only marginally useful.
As far as I can tell that's correct and even "marginally useful" is an overstatement. Their distraction bombs caused "a small fire", their first pipe bomb outside the school "only partially detonated, causing it to give off smoke" that was interpreted as a prank, and most of the bombs didn't detonate at all. I can't find any sources unequivocally identifying a single wound from a bomb! Even the few reports of "shrapnel" I find seem to be talking about a teacher and two students who took indirect impacts from debris like splintered wood kicked up by near-miss gun shots. The bombs were just distraction and delay in the end; they could have brought a ton of smoke bombs and just called in a phony threat of real bombs and the consequences would have been the same.
roystgnr
6d ago
not all killers are capable of bomb construction.
The Columbine killers constructed something like a hundred bombs, but are only remembered for their mass shooting "backup plan" because their bombs mostly failed to detonate. It's hard to call anything about a massacre "lucky", but although the mass shooting had dozens of victims (including 13 deaths), their biggest bombs could have had hundreds.
There's also killers who are too capable of making a bomb detonate. Bombing victims are often immediately bombing suspects, because even murderers who can make working bombs have a tendency to bomb themselves with one sooner or later.
roystgnr
6d ago
He walked me through a read of the Anarchist Cookbook once and taught me why it’s not a good reference to use at all. “If you do this… followed by this… what happens is that… and creates a mixture of this… at which point, you will die.”
That kind of homebrew activity was the norm. Byproduct of a different time.
I hit high school right around the time that online networks (not even the internet yet, just garbage like AOL) were growing like mad, and the sharper adults had figured out that most kids now basically had unfettered access to anything that could be encoded as a text or image file. My chemistry teacher begged to help any of us who might actually try an Anarchist Cookbook explosives recipe, also based on the proposition that too many of its recipes were suicidal if followed as-written. I don't think anyone took her up on it, though; the wildest homebrew reaction I ever ended up seeing was a friend's thermite in college.
I wouldn’t know as far as manufacturing standard munitions for firearms, how difficult that would be.
From what I've read, even modern powder isn't too hard ... though some of the precursors are supposedly in the "legal, but bulk purchase will bring men with badges to your door for a friendly chat" category. The tricky chemicals to manufacture without killing yourself are primers.
I was reading about this in the course of post-apocalyptic-fiction background research, though, looking at the context of a setting where people would eventually have to redevelop manufacturing capacity for everything. In the modern US, reloaders can buy a box of 1000 primers online for under $100. Chris Rock's bullet control routine was hilarious, but essentially impossible. Even if we focus on the difficulty of making your own primers, there's no way to effectively ban something that's been sold in billion-unit-per-year quantities and can be shelf-stable indefinitely.
roystgnr
6d ago
What did we/they learn? There's been one trial of a Uvalde officer so far; he was acquitted of all charges.
Which ... was predictable? I think "police aren't legally required to do jack" is solid settled precedent in the US. I wanted to see a trial over their incapacitation of the parents; that was where a line may have been crossed from "failing their duty" to "accomplices".
roystgnr
8d ago
Lambert. I don't recall her having any conversations with Ripley without other crew members included too, though.
roystgnr
10d ago
That's very fair. Jordan's problem before the illness wasn't lack of interest, it was so much interest that every book seemed to get 25% longer than the previous despite covering 25% less ground.
roystgnr
10d ago
You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.
roystgnr
10d ago
but the scene isn't typically described
Oh, sure. I'm not wanting to know how Tolkien would have described defecation, just whether it should have logically had some impact on the story that was ignored because not intending to describe it led to not even considering it. Off the top of my head: Is the mood turning even more dour because after the Black Riders nobody wants to risk wandering far enough away to get some privacy? Is Frodo's departure in the Breaking of the Fellowship considered unremarkable because they have been in the habit of wandering far enough away for privacy?
The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.
I'd say that's the problem. They're tracking the orcs because of Merry and Pippin's capture; it's a horrible time for comic relief (or bathos, if it comes off as comic accidentally) to ruin the tension. There's no safe place to comment until like half a dozen chapters later when the characters are safe and getting each other caught up, and at that point there's no reason for more detail than a quick euphemism about "the smell" or maybe at most "leavings".
roystgnr
10d ago
It is, but the unforeseeable future is still up for grabs, and there's so much more of that.
roystgnr
10d ago
Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?
That specifically would be silly, but I can imagine Fellowship with an aside about how discomfited the hobbits are (or aren't? Bywater to Frogmorton looks to be an 18 mile stretch with no rest stops...) to be "roughing it" in this sense too. I even think some of Fellowship and the Two Towers might actually be improved by a brief mention of how careful the fellowship tries to be after they realize they're being hunted and tracked, or of how much easier orcs' disgusting habits make tracking those.
Hah, I did type "Ringworld", huh? I'll edit that. My oldest daughter liked the first two Ringworld books but I warned her that they go downhill fast from there.
I'm ashamed to admit that, when I heard of the "Discworld" books after having already heard of Alderson disk worlds (probably from Niven, the author of Ringworld, partially explaining my mental short-circuit above), I thought the whole "you know, like flat Earth, but for comedy" thing sounded like enormously disappointing worldbuilding by comparison. It was probably 15 years later before I realized how wrong I was.
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