I don't know for sure, but from his CV, I'd guess I am similar in age to the author. He described remembering the venue (possibly separately to it being the meeting's venue) but not the meeting itself. I would have similar selective memories of business events from 10-15 years ago, amongst years of many meetings and opportunities. Sometimes I have a strong memory of one aspect, but no recollection at all of another. And I can identify with finding that email phrasing (about someone's "situation") being something that might prompt me to send it to people close to me as a sort of "look what happened to me today" thing.
Depends upon how tight knit is the family, yes, it seems strange for me as well. Members in some families are unusually friendly. My family won't even trust me hosting them an Immich library.
In my experience many of them do feel like they're doing something important, and some seem principally motivated to do the job by the promise of being able to bully travellers.
First I agree TSA is mostly theater... however if you HAD to have it, you want the people to work like this. I might be old-school but I think everyone should have pride and responsibility in their work. Even if from the outside it is meaningless.
100% no reason to be a bully, that is not pride/responsibility. Every job has ass assholes.
>Yeah, but jobs that are police-adjacent have them at a very high rate. Almost like they select for it or something...
Proximity to violence is probably the measuring stick you're looking for.
Police spend the bulk of their day credibly threatening violence. Just about every word that comes out of their mouth, pen or keyboard while they're at work is implicitly back by an "or else". Everyone who isn't an asshole is gonna wash out of that job, start doing something behind a desk, start a PI firm, etc. etc. So you're left with rookie and assholes and the occasional exception.
The TSA, all your non-police state and municipal enforcement agencies, etc, etc, are gonna serve to concentrate "asshole lites" people because anybody who isn't will have issues spending their day dispensing what are basically "do as I say, or pay what I say, or else the police will do violence on you" threats on behalf of the state and so they'll jump ship as they become jaded same as cops do, but the pressures are less because they're not as proximate to the violence.
You can take this a third step out. There are all sorts of industries, jobs, etc, etc. that exist soley to keep the above two groups off your back. Nobody wants to hire these people, but are basically forced to under 3rd hand thread of violence. Same effect, but still watered down.
Even more removed are jobs where some fraction of the business is driven to you under similar circumstances. For example, ask any mechanic. People forced to be there by a state inspection program are consistently the worst customers. And there's the same wash out effect. People get tired of arguing about tread depth or whatever and they go turn wrenches on forklifts or whatever.
Proximity to petty power might be a better measuring stick. The same sorts of people gravitate to those jobs as the people who sit at the DMV window and tell you you need to get back in line, wait another two hours, and go to a different DMV window with the correct form.
Probably the reverse: obnoxious people who seek badge-given authority but fail police entry exams (e.g. the psych part), carry on to other forms of employment that offer badges and uniforms, but have lax standards.
If I have a question for SO these days then I ask Claude instead and tell it to use SO where possible. It's preferable to actually asking it on SO which often results in the question being edited, downvoted and closed by someone with an anime child profile picture.
What was the question like? "How to print a decimal in C"? Valuable questions aren't downvoted. If you ask about something that could be found on the first Google page, then no surprise you are being downvoted.
I asked a novel question, well-written and clear, and a "subject matter expert" decided it was too similar to another question (it wasn't), so they defaced it, downvoted it and closed it.
Stack Overflow is dying, it's extremely difficult to get new questions through. Even if they survive moderation then they're unlikely to get answers.
It's become a lot more difficult to win online since online poker was banned in the USA. The USA sat at a huge net loss online and every other country profited.
At every age, there's a high attrition of students participating in competitive sports, until only a tiny elite remains. Is that what we want for reading and math?
yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read. What's wrong with a tiny elite remaining if it's based on actually being able to do the work?
The biggest red flag here for me is not that the tiny elite remain, it's that life circumstances will dictate that the majority of the tiny elite will continue to come from privileged families who have the time and resources to give their kids a leg up. BUT pushing kids into places where they objectively cannot compete intellectually or physically under the auspices of fairness is the devil's work. We need constant work at creating equality and to lower barriers to social services, not "fairness" and pretending everyone is already equal.
When I was 8, in the first grade, I hummed in class. I read comic books, I napped, I generally fucked about, around, and several other prepositions. I did this to such an extent that the teacher wanted to shunt me into the shame places you want to shunt these kids into. Fortunately my mother caught wind of this and, knowing what level my intellect was at when it was allowed a little freedom and presented with a challenge, raised actual holy hell at that little Catholic school outside Pittsburgh. Thank God she did, because I ended up being tested and started along the gifted track. My brother in law, otoh, is just as smart as me and just as defiantly internal as me. He didn't have an advocate. For him, school was 12 years of no resources, no opportunities, no goals, and memorizing a copy of The Lion King on VHS. Now I make a tidy living as a software engineer and I'm pretty decent at it. He lives at home with his mom because he never graduated high school, so he stays in all day and hand-hacks NES roms literally bit by bit. He's a shitload better than me at a very valuable thing and no one can take advantage of that, not him, not some employer, not society in general, because he was disposed of by a school system that wanted to get him out of the way of all the future contributors.
This idea that school is a place where kids compete with one another, the weak are weeded out and the strong are rewarded with additional resources is a disgusting perversion of an institution we used to recognize as providing a baseline for everyone. And it simply doesn't work.
> yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read.
Failing to teach kids how to read is a failure of the school system, not the kid.
Dropping kids because the school system failed them is just yet another failure of a school system, and one which is at best a self-serving failure: a way to mask the extent of which the system is broken by blaming the victims of said system.
As an exercise, invest a few minutes thinking on why most communities do not experience this failure rate.
this, absolutely. when the person you're replying to asked "What's wrong with their being a tiny elite" they seem to be purposely ignoring the fact that what we're measuring is competence in basic skills. A school isn't supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 99 droupouts and one nuclear physicist. A school is supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 100 kids who can read, write, do math and understand how their society works well enough to participate in it meaningfully.
And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
> And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
That's besides the point, and orthogonal to the discussion. If after 3 years a school system failed to teach kids how to read, that represents a failure of the school system. If a school system feels the need to hold kids back so early in hopes that subjecting them yet again to the same school system that already failed them will somehow improve outcomes, this means the same school system is not investing in fixing the real problem.
This is like buying bad tires. If a tire blows up, you can argue all you want that changing the tire is much better than keeping a flat tire on. But the root cause is that the tire blows up, isn't it? Changing a bad tire with yet another bad tire won't fix the problem, will it? The tire you just added will easily blow up again, and everyone else buying those tires will go through the same problem.
I repeat, advocating for holding kids back and even rejecting underperforming kids from the school system is a Hallmark of a deeply broken, unsalvageable system. The only purpose of these approaches is to falsify the actual quality of the work performed by the school system, and generating fraudulent statistics of success at the expense of throwing kids under the bus.
That's how it used to work. But people noticed that some groups got held back at higher rates than others, and there were accusations of isms, and so most schools decided it would be better for everyone involved to stop doing that. Also, holding a kid back came to be seen as cruel since the other kids would make fun of him, which was probably true.
For the same reason, they mostly got rid of "tracks," where an age group would be divided into different classrooms according to test scores and previous grades rather than random chance, so the 'A' fourth grade room could go at a different pace from the 'B' fourth grade room. All that's left of that is gifted programs, which people somehow accept even though they're just the mirror image of holding kids back.
There's really not a good answer, because like it or not, learning ability varies, so if you put 25 kids in the same classroom for no reason other than their being the same age and living in the same neighborhood, some are going to struggle and fail and some are going to cruise and be bored.
I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what. That there's nothing you actually need to learn in 3rd grade in order to be advanced to 4th grade.
I would say that the point is that you can't just look at one datapoint, especially if there are other things affecting it.
The most obvious case of this is comparing private vs public schools, where the private schools can be selective and kick out anyone who doesn't perform or they don't like, but the public schools have to accept everyone by law.
Obviously failing anyone who cannot read from getting to 4th grade will greatly improve 8th grade reading scores.
Those failing kids eventually make it to the 8th grade, however, and affect statistics. Still, having lived there and attending one of the better middle and high schools near Vicksburg, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were gaming the system in some way (I hope they aren’t and these gains are real, though).
If a kid achieves a great 8th grade test score at age 18, is that a success or a failure of the system?
What we care about is the level of achievement by a given age. To determine that, we need to be comparing states using standardized tests given to age groups, not grade levels. It is fine to hold students back, if we think that will do them more good than advancing them. But they still need to be tested the same way as their age group if we want to do a meaningful comparison between states.
You are strawmanning my argument as I didn't say anything like that. I said that if you are going to evaluate a policy with statistics, you need to compare apples to apples because statistics are easily biased.
See this example of a paradox that applies a lot in educational settings: you can raise the average level of two classes just by shuffling students from one to another:
> So explain to me what "eliminating bad data points" in this context means. Should MS schools not hold back failing 3rd graders
The data point is the number of 3rd graders failing. If you insist in filtering out those 3rd graders, limiting your analysis to the subset of kids who didn't failed does not represent a success story. It represents an attempt to arbitrarily remove inconvenient data points to portray a false idea if success.
I disagree, I think it points to a core educational policy difference between states. Some states will not fail a 3rd grader, and Mississippi will. This has an obvious impact on 4th grade scores, yes, but I'm willing to bet if you followed those "failed" 3rd graders in MS and compared to other states where they were pushed ahead, holding under-achieving students back is a net positive.
> (...) holding under-achieving students back is a net positive.
Even if we assume that's the case, that's not the problem.
The problem is that the school system fails to provide the necessary and sufficient services that would prevent a statistically significant number of 3rd graders from being held back. Feeling the need to hold kids back is a symptom of the problem, not a solution.
This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results.
I strongly suspect that Mississippi should be allocating more resources to education. But this is a political problem and the schools have nearly no say in whether the legislature does or does not increase funding.
So. Do we close down the schools and wait until it is resolved?
Or do the schools do the best they can with the resources they have? Do you have evidence that placing kids in the most skill-appropriate classroom is a worse use of available resources than placing them in the “correct” classroom based on age or previous cohort?
> This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results.
"Ton of spending" are weasel words. "Not a ton of results" is already the problem.
If your school system fails to teach kids how to read after 3 years, this is a school system that fails at it's primary and most basic responsibility. These third-graders are not the problem, they are the canary in the coal mine.
Advocating for holding back third graders and expelling underperformers is a kin to advocate for getting rid of canaries because they are a nuisance when assessing health and safety.
An obvious comparison seems like it would be to compare age cohort rather than grade cohort. Your question confuses a comment on objective methodology with one a more subjective one on the response to that.
> I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what.
If a school system is designed so that the average kid in 3rd grade is expected to be in 4th grade the following year, the fact that a statistically significant subset of kids is not able to meet that bar is a sign that the system is failing those kids.
What's the goal here? Is it to get pretty metrics by filtering out the failures, or is it to provide an effective education to all kids?
How do you know its statistically significant? Nothing in the article (or anywhere else I looked) suggests a "statistically significant" portion of 3rd graders, whatever that means, are being held back.
> Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?
I think the point is that the school system is outputting kids that are not prepared for the academic environment they create themselves for these kids. So instead of fixing the problem, they are eliminating the bad results to inflate the success statistics.
The author posted a link to an article[1] showing that Mississippi's retention policies were not responsible for the increase in scores.
> But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.
> ...
> In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.
If you're going to be using an air fryer why bother with delivery then? Just put frozen food in there at that point for 10% of the cost of delivery+tip and you're eating sooner to boot.
That meme is such a load of hogwash. In many ways, US English is closer to "traditional" than UK English. They've both diverged somewhat from what they were in the 17th century. Neither form has been "simplified" in any way.
As for the Union Jack: the UK has at least 3 rather different languages (English, Gaelic, Welsh), possibly a few more depending on how you count the different kinds of Gaelic.
Using a country flag to represent a language has always struck me as being silly. Only rarely do they map 1-to-1.
It's entirely a joke based on the two different versions of "Chinese" offered on most websites, it's not really meant to be taken seriously. But I've heard that there's an island in New England somewhere whose local accent is closest to Elizabethan English.
> Some people have characterised Tangier’s way of speaking as ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Restoration’ English, but that’s nonsense. Languages aren’t static and the Tangier dialect has changed a lot because of its isolation. It’s a distinct creation of its own," Shores said.
Yeah, but there is a real difference between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Traditional are more ornamental/complicated while simplified are ... simplified/minimalist .
It's primarily a reference to various language selection dropdowns offering "Chinese (Traditional)" (which is used in Taiwan) and "Chinese (Simplified)" (which is used on the Chinese mainland). That difference arises from Mao-era simplification of many of the most common hanzi characters to make them easier to write or distinguish.
Mixed with, yes, the variant spellings and word choices (e.g. chips/crisps/biscuits) that make it apparent to British English readers when something is American.
I think my confusion is more from the implication that variant spellings imply "simplification"—even at a glance, simplified and traditional hanzi differ greatly in complexity, whereas I don't see how "chips" is any simpler than "crisps", even as a joke....
EDIT: Of course, it doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things—feel free to ignore my pedantry over a silly joke :-)
This really isn’t a positive point. Flags represent nations, not languages, and it can be quite offensive to equate the two.
To use your example, there are plenty of Irish people who speak English but would resent being forced to identify with the Union Flag.
For another example that is very relevant today, there are plenty of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who hate Russia. Using the Russian flag to represent them would at best be distasteful.
That's actually a really good point that seems obvious, but I hadn't considered before. I wonder what a better solution is. ISO language codes[1], I guess?
Of the five languages I have configured in KDE, three of them are country-specific. So I use the flag indicator, which is far quicker for me to locate and identify out of the corner of my eye than would be a text label (which would require using the retina and thus more time and attention).
Sure, fine for personal uses. I mean broadly and generally.
As for English, the United States has far and away the largest number of native English speakers.
Not that I think the stars and stripes has any more right to represent “English” as a concept any more than the Union Jack. If you’re going on origin, why not the flag of England instead?
I mostly meant that facetiously as now we're entering the linguistic quagmire of trying to pin down an exact origin for a language, and furthermore (depending on your chosen definition of "English") the language itself predates the current flag of England, so even that is open to debate regarding its appropriateness.
The moral is: don't try to draw boxes around languages.
All that said, I do understand why someone would want to use flags as shorthand for language. It's wrong, but it's useful.
Rather ironic, considering that it’s a flag to indicate personal union of ownership of subjects and lands by the Scottish king who inherited the subjects and lands of England, but you prefer it to be the icon for the language of the state of England, a country in which its own language is more or less indecipherable in many places due to accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization.
You would be far more likely to understand any given English speaking person in the USA than in England. It should really be called American at this point.
> accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization.
There are just as many accents and dialects of English in the Americas as there are in Britain. Even your term "creolization" comes from Louisiana. It's a matter of perspective and something that all language learners will have the face, the difference between 'standard' English/Spanish/German and regional variations both within it's originating country and from abroad.
This is UK law(?) or standard across all rail networks. It's automated too, you don't have to fill in a form. Immediately after arriving at your destination you get an email telling you that your train was delayed by enough to give you compensation, click a link and the money is in your bank account in a couple of days.
I use Sublime as my notepad alternative. I use no plugins and don't know any keyboard shortcuts but I love it. It's quick, the tabs work well, you don't have to save files for it to remember them...
A very strange action to take for someone who claims to have no recollection of the meeting.