Do you think the department of education writes the textbooks, standardized tests (SAT, ACT, etc.), grading and student management software, learning management systems (Google Classroom, Canvas), or manufactures its own classroom tech (Chromebooks, tablets)?

Each one of those has a bunch of particular nuances, but in general - yeah, I think they could and should in a lot of those cases

The education system is full of for-profit businesses that can jack up the prices, and they do.

Yeah, it’s a big problem with a lot of little parts to be tackled

The DOE simply doesn’t have the resources to create these things themselves

Then government should give them the resources (actually, I think a whole separate agency that develops open source software for any government agency or anyone else who wants to use them should be established, but that’s kind of besides the point).

and would cost them far more if they tried

I don’t think that’s true, and even if it were I think we should be willing to pay premium to make sure essential systems that support the public good are being administered in democratic ways (e.g. by public agencies that are required to give public reports to elected lawmakers and be subject to citizens’ FOIA requests).

the business model has existed forever

A lot of stupid ideas hang on for a really long time. Like, we still have monarchies in the 21st century world.

Personally, I’m more concerned with the use of Google products in schools. A company that’s sole business is harvesting user data and selling it to advertisers should have no place in schools or children’s products. But they’ve embedded themselves into everything so people just accept it at the cost of privacy

I 100% agree this is a significant problem too, I just haven’t come across any good articles about it recently

Exactly, they’re a captive audience, and moreover they are legally incompetent to consent to a contracted business relationship like this

If this was a department of education AI or even some kind of transparently administered non-profit organization I’d be fine with this, but the fact that this is being developed for some for profit company that can just jack their rates and cut off public schools whenever they want to is bullshit. Like, I’m not opposed to the technology of LLMs at all, I think they’re actually pretty neat, but our social and economic systems have a lot of exploitative trash in them that cool technologies can inadvertently exacerbate.

An American security contractor and a Chinese embassy employee are at a bar. The American says, “I gotta say, your propaganda is impressive. You sure know how to keep your people in line.”

“Oh, you’re too gracious,” the embassy worker says. “And besides, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda.”

The contractor chokes on his drink and gives his friend a bewildered look.

“What are you talking about? There’s no propaganda in America.”

“Imposing any kind of environmental regulations in businesses would destroy the entire economy, concludes team of economists paid by those businesses. Coming up next - are you doing enough to protect your family from dangerous toxins in our environment? We’ll tell you what a dumb and lazy piece of shit you are, after these ads!”

“They asked me how well I understood class consciousness. I said I was a member of the conscious class. They said welcome aboard.”

Ah, you’re totally right,thank you, I’d been using those interchangeably without thinking about it much

Synthesis: everyone should have a well constructed residence with ample sound dampening where late night fireworks and early morning traffic noise wouldn’t be a problem. Capitalist real estate developers minimizing their costs and maximizing their profits have us fighting each other when they’re the real problem.

e; I was actually thinking microphones would pick up and retransmit sounds after running it through some reverb and flanging to get a cozy underwater effect, but damping external sounds makes a lot more sense

Ah you are totally right and thank you for the correction, I got taught at a young age by a very nice but very overworked public school music teacher that there were just eight notes and not to worry about anything more complicated than that and my brain always really wants to default back to that

I don’t know for sure, but the Jaws theme is definitely a half-step interval, so the spacing of the keys in the meme is right at least

Random trivia I learned from a music theory YouTuber, the bass line to Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name kind of does the same thing, except instead of going back and forth a single half step it does nine thirteen (aka, an eight note octave plus one note half-step)

e; You’d think I’d remember that there are twelve tones in an octave given the name of that music theory channel

FWIW, the article author also wrote a book called “Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food”

Poltifact: “Mostly false”

Not the most evil bastard in history, but I think the world would be a vastly different and better place if Klemens von Metternich died young.

he did.

*organized labor forced him to do.

You might dig No Joy, Lush, Cindy Lee, the Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine

What the hell is shoegaze, anyway?

Ask four different people and you’ll get four different answers, but the term first started to get thrown at bands as an insult around the late 80s in the UK because guitarists in certain alternative bands would be using so many different effects during their performances they’d spend the whole show staring at their pedalboards (I think a review of a My Bloody Valentine show in particular is where the term got coined)

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Yeah, I’m not a Texan but I also disagree about this. Also, Austin has produced some amazing music over the years (for example, random Austin band I’ve been in love with recently is Being Dead).

Boo Radley weird vs Bob Ewell weird

Also, I’d be amazed if they didn’t have a way to get contact information from non-political sources. Like, off the top of my head - if I’m running a Dem campaign I’d be talking to every car dealership I could and seeing if I can buy their list of people who signed up for updates on EV availability to see if I can turn some of those people to donors, and I’m pretty certain there’s no laws or regulations that would stop them from doing that.

I think I agree, but I’d phrase it a bit differently. The problem in our country isn’t division, it’s that there’s an energetic fascist movement that needs to be stopped. The problem with assassinating Trump is that it gives that movement a martyr and would very much energize them (disorganize them too, since they wouldn’t know for sure who to follow anymore, but they’ve never needed to be too organized to do damage and they could do plenty before succession fueled infighting really started to take a toll).

Killing Trump won’t kill his ideas, the only way to do that is to embarrass Trump and Trumpism badly, so I think the best series of events would be a) Trump loses the election, b) prosecutors explain Trump’s many crimes in meticulous detail to a series of juries who sentence Trump to years and years behind bars, c) Trump dies of a heart attack while taking a shit in prison.

The fact that the voters already did a) once in 2020 and the system’s let us down on b) is deeply frustrating and worth acknowledging for the sake of identifying the country’s underlying problems (it’s the politicians and lawyers more than it is the voters), but it doesn’t change the fact that assassinating Trump is the last thing we want to do at this point.

I don’t recall learning about the last time the Tops grocery shooter looked at porn