Gaashk
1d ago
I'm pretty sure there are a few Jewish Mottizens, since it's a spinoff of SSC, and also people occasionally mention Jewish stuff, though more likely to be American.
In general, I think the moderation here is fine. It doesn't have to be all things to all people. It is true that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" doesn't always happen, but the mods do generally remind people about it.
Gaashk
1d ago
I entered an encaustic painting for the local library art show in a couple of months; they don't have very high standards and are unlikely to reject it. I also entered some pieces for a show that has standards, and they're supposed to respond by the end of the month about whether they're accepted or not. They are oil paintings and oil and cold wax. I've been enjoying oil and cold wax lately, because of the way it allows scratching or carving back through the layers, and would like to experiment with it further.
Gaashk
1d ago
Edit to add: the title of the movie was pretty awful as well. Like who (or what) the hell is “Elio”? It gives you absolutely nothing to work with, nothing about space or aliens or anything. So matching that up with the bland art and the minimal marketing gives no hook at all to actually want to go out and see it.
I don't necessarily think that was a problem, considering how well liked Coco is, but Coco has a much better hook. There are school field trips to see live musical performances inspired by Coco, for instance, which they organize around Day of the Dead.
Luca was at least very summery, and came out when the art style was a bit fresher. I thought it was cute, and my four year old liked it a lot.
Gaashk
1d ago
I agree with this take.
In my experience, the people who are really worried about decaying former company towns are also worried about places like Detroit, which used to have a higher proportion of functional, employed black men with families (they say, I'd be open to an argument that this is a myth I suppose).
The people who are really worried about good New York schools crowding out white and Asian kids in favor of racial quotas because of disparate impact are different people, much more likely to go on about "HBD," but they're probably just as upset about being yelled at on the subway by black, white, or hispanic druggies. I think these are the ones who are tired of trying to solve the druggies' problems for them, and would like them to be locked up or denied expensive, repeated medical care, and would be completely unsurprised at the stats about their average demographics.
Gaashk
1d ago
It's a really dense mishmash of a bunch of different things, any one of which might be interesting to explore, but together just kind of form an overcooked soup.
It would be much, much better with one or two concrete rightists as a foil, especially since the people who are worried about disparate impact keeping their kids out of medical school or Yale or something are in a coalition with, but distinct from, the people who are worried about their depressing rust belt family members failing to #learntocode. An adversarial but earnest take on Vance, for instance, would be more interesting.
Gaashk
1d ago
I didn't report it and have mixed feelings about the ban, but it wasn't a good top level post.
Gaashk
1d ago
It's probably related to attributes of people who do go to movies in the evening, pay full price, and don't sneak food in for cheap in their backpacks. I'm not sure I know anyone like that, so I can't say what they're looking for in a movie. Personally, I haven't seen a movie in a theater in about a decade, and even then I went about once or twice a year (but would go when convenient and buy some snacks when I did). So the companies don't have to consider my preferences, or the preferences of people like me.
Who went to Mufasa opening weekend? Why did they do it?
Brandon Sanderson occasionally comments a bit, cautiously because he does actually want Mistborn movies, about what it's like trying to work with a big film studio, and it sounds like normal, decent, popular writers have a great deal of trouble interfacing with them, mostly because the studios change things for reasons that are their own, unrelated to the writers or audience members. There are too many fingers in the pie. That shows up when they do try to adapt popular recent franchises -- I watched Good Omens, Sandman, and The Wheel of Time, and enjoyed many things about them, especially costuming, music, credits sequences, and some of the acting. But it's really hard to keep things on track when there are so many people making decisions, some of whom care about aesthetics, and others care a lot about casting disabled angels, stuffing even more queerness into already very queer friendly franchises, getting more screen time for their boyfriend (WoT specific?), and all sorts of other things. And then maybe they get cancelled at an inopportune moment.
Gaashk
2d ago
The new Sanderson novel, Isles of the Emberdark. It is, of course, not very sophisticated or thoughty, but is a fun little adventure.
Gaashk
6d ago
I think disability actually does work that way, but suffers from benefit cliffs that disincentivize some people from doing the work that they're able to do.
Gaashk
9d ago
Does orthodoxy really have such a strong norm towards ‘children must be PERFECT in liturgy or not go’?
No, the children can play nicely while whispering, nap, color, flop about a bit on the rug, or walk in and out as they're able to behave quietly or not. One priest said that he'd rather they were there and screaming than not there, but nobody behaves like they believe him, including his own wife and children.
Mostly, though, if we can't receive Communion, can't hear or concentrate on the prayers, can't sing, can't hear the sermon because we spend it either suppressing child activity or in a different room, then where are we even doing?
Edit: We'd probably do better if we had a specific goal, and should probably go talk to a priest about it. I know.
Gaashk
10d ago
I used ChatGPT once to do a required writing task that I thought was useless and didn't want to do. I did edit it for some semblance of accuracy, but did not exactly read it, nor do I remember what it said. If I thought it mattered or was a useful thing to do I would have written it myself, I like writing essays, including college essays.
Gaashk
10d ago
Homemaking no longer takes a full day, when done in a sane fashion and without small children at home.
Gaashk
11d ago
The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture
What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).
Gaashk
11d ago
Indeed. I'm not quite anonymous enough here to talk about this in detail, but it's very much an issue. Trainings can become incredibly hollow if the administrators aren't fully on board, so that teachers don't even understand or have access to the full ideas behind what they're supposed to be implementing, even if they want to do it.
Gaashk
11d ago
in the corporate world
Is that synonymous with "doing paid labor?" It's not usually used that way.
I tried looking up some information about this from BLS:
Mothers of younger children remained less likely to participate in the labor force than mothers with older children. In 2024, 68.3 percent of mothers with children under age 6 participated in the labor force compared with 78.0 percent of mothers whose youngest child was ages 6 to 17.
Caring for children under six is daycare more than schooling, so I'll leave that out. So apparently 22% of mothers are full time homemakers or unemployed. 3.4% of children are homeschooled, according to the internet.
What's the base rate of unemployment for women without children? I couldn't find that quickly -- the overall prime age labor force participation rate is 78% for women, the same as for mothers of school aged children, and 88% for men. So maybe there's some room for 10% of women who could be in the labor force, but aren't? Of whom 3%-4% are homeschooling?
That's not literally nobody, but someone who's going to do a good job homeschooling their kids won't be at the absolute bottom or capability, either. What are they otherwise doing while their kids are in school?
Gaashk
11d ago
A couple of thoughts:
- Almost nobody is good at getting preferred behaviors from people who don't want to cooperate. Even good managers are not all that good at it, they refuse to hire almost everyone, and sometimes fire people when things aren't working out. Paying more sometimes helps, but there are a decent number of unemployable people out there. All of them were once children who's teachers couldn't remove them from class for more than about 10 minutes at a time unless they physically assaulted someone.
- Almost nobody is good at social science research, including actual social science and educational researchers.
- Elementary teachers are not selected for their educational research and testing abilities, they are selected for patience with small children, helping them learn to get along with each other, and the ability to work within a system that isn't all that well designed, where nobody can ever be expelled and almost nobody can be fired or demoted.
- Individual teachers can't decide anything about curriculum, schedules, or class compositions. Which are almost everything. They can conduct classroom management, and do actually iterate a lot on who sits next to whom, sticker charts, fidgets, and so on.
- "If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work." It depends on what you mean by work. If you have an unstable client who keeps freaking out and throwing things around the room and pulling random people's hair, and your method works to decrease that but not to improve other metrics, did it work?
Gaashk
11d ago
I am very glad that the person who built the house I own:
- Installed a metal roof
- Planned ahead for water flow, and intentionally designed the landscaping around it.
A big house like that might be hard to cool in the summer. I don't have any specific suggestions -- we can't afford a full house air conditioner, so we're all in the main room with the window unit in during summer afternoons, and use open windows and fans at night.
Gaashk
11d ago
Or, alternately, they are much more expensive, unless you consider the mother's labor to be completely worthless. If her labor is actually worthless, and the alternative is that she just sits at home watching TV all day, then she probably won't be very good as a homeschool teacher, either.
Apparently Arizona offers about $4,000/child.
Gaashk
11d ago
It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.
I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.
Gaashk
11d ago
I guess I can see the appeal.
Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.
Gaashk
11d ago
From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.
My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.
Gaashk
12d ago
I suppose a "good regulatory environment" is one where the nuns can teach for cheap, the children can bring their own lunches, and any children who don't do well under those circumstances can go to public school instead at much higher cost to the state. If there are still enough nuns.
Gaashk
12d ago
Another interesting comment from the Substack:
Jessica Lopez
As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.
There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.
This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.
N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.
I felt like the biggest problem with Brave was that it didn't lean fully enough into being a Disney princess animated musical -- it needed more songs, and the relationship with her mother was a bit off somehow; she needed to talk with her great great grandmother, spinning the threads of fate up in the tower or something. Old Disney might have integrated some actual Scottish fairy tales, which were my absolute favorites growing up. The Golden Key is especially excellent.
Personally, I usually enjoy the Disney musicals more in general -- Encanto and Moana were quite fun (though I hear Wish fell flat, and haven't bothered watching it).
It would probably have worked to make a Pixar version of Stitch, that could be a lot of fun -- make it like Monsters inc, with more emphasis on Stitch and the aliens.
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