I’m not sure I agree this is an awful location if you’re going to make a big studio campus. It’s not in Austin atm but it will be eventually (it’s currently surrounded) and 290/183 are useful veins. You say “outside Manor” like it’s also not ~10 miles from the capitol and downtown. In LA terms that’s basically nothing.

That said, as an eastsider, yeah fuck the billionaires generally and the Ellisons specifically.

American people have plenty of empathy and compassion, what they don’t have is literally anyone else to call.

If you have an emergency, you call 911 and as soon as they hear the word “gun” cops are the only outcome. Maybe in some universe a person has some foresight in case of a suicidal person with a gun and can look up local resources or something, but until we have something built into emergency services for this, panicked people are going to do the one thing they can think of when someone needs help.

I’d vote for AOC a thousand times harder than for Newsom. I’m not sure she actually wants the position though, she’s potentially got a long career as a rep (or senator) in front of her and could probably turn into a Presidential candidate in any cycle, but having a major legislative win is bigger than that, according to her

Bari Weiss is a disgusting hack, and laughably unqualified, but being a news outlet editor is way more complicated than just rubber stamping factual reporting. Editors allocate resources - from writers and photographers/crews to even start a story, to how the front page is divvied up, how stories are promoted, how many column inches (or words, or minutes) a topic gets.

Point being that there are definitely feelings involved. Even if it’s one story is more interesting than another, or we’ve covered this topic more than enough lately, or this story is factual but not adding anything new, etc. etc. etc. It’s a hard job, and more subjective than you’d think, so I don’t blame her for being defensive when she’s literally the worst editor to ever hold a national news desk down.

There’s a new medical procedure that needs to be done only once. Kinetic injection of lead to the brain. So simple it can be self administered, or with the help of a friend in line of sight.

I do think no matter what reforms we do in schools, the subject being the most interesting / stimulating thing currently available must help a lot.

We are getting to a point where we need to rethink how we teach to be more resistant to technological distractions. Students would be more stimulated by topics they are interested in and pursuing interests doesn’t stop when the school day ends. Instead, kids are bored all day and naturally looking to relieve that boredom by focusing on passive videos or social media.

If we make the classroom reward being self-driven and passionate in an environment mirroring the real world (with guardrails provided by schools) we’d get driven, passionate students ready to operate in reality.

… Of course, we’d probably have to have motivated teachers that give a damn, kill toxic social media, and abolish capitalism to keep kids from trying to make pragmatic, soul crushing decisions to make money over interests but, well, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

30 fold means 30x not 30%, but I agree the article could use some more raw numbers.

That said, I don’t think it’s in doubt that our education system is fucking up. The current gen of college students, my son included, got their high school experience seriously fucked by Covid and now LLMs are basically devaluing having skills at all. I feel bad for kids these days, their prospects are so much worse than basically any previous gen, even with degrees.

Not that these are wrong, but I wonder about recency bias. Have these indicators been trending downward for 20 years, or is this just a response to our current crop of morons?

If Obama v2 was elected tomorrow, would these instantly reverse, like the international opinion seemed to when he took over from W?

Have some links for the manipulation? I don’t think the Republicans really want to see either of them, frankly but I like Crockett.

Sorry, that would mean the rich would get richer slightly slower. Best we can do is make insurance twice as expensive to appease our donors.

The treatment of Bernie in the 2016 primary also made me lose faith in our form of flawed Democracy. Living in a red state, primaries are my only chance to have any effect on the national Democratic Party and 2016 made it obvious they would accept no challenge to the status quo. Superdelegates are plainly undemocratic, but the post Citizens United world makes both parties absolutely beholden to the corporations.

We literally can not have a candidate that is against business and therefore can not have a candidate that is against fascism.

That said, I will probably continue to pull the lever on my purely symbolic, utterly pointless, placebo vote for the lesser of two evils because people don’t understand that the only non-voters that matter are the ones in battleground states.

This made me laugh. This is the same shit we’ve been doing for 100 years. “Illegal orders” aren’t a thing when you use your imperial military to do imperialism. The last time we had a President that wasn’t a war criminal was never.