dmvdoug

No, there is no more to this. They fucking eliminated grants for studies on transgenic mice because they thought that was the same thing as transgender. That’s the level of thought and care put into this.

How about the non-offenders we deported there this very month who received no process in this country and whom the government has now been forced to admit or accidentally sent there?

Gotta say, my man, you were the one making blanket proclamations about what governments must care for first. Yet you shy away from defending the principle.

“How will we be able to learn anything about the human centipede if we don’t let researchers act in full transparency to study it?”

Well, regardless of whatever you think about truly reciprocal tariffs, the Trump Tariffs are not that. They released the formula they used to calculate the levels and it has nothing to do with other countries’ trade barriers. It’s like literally trade deficit with that country divided by imports. Which is utterly unhinged, with no basis in theory or reality. But again, even if you disagree, that is not the definition of a reciprocal tariff.

Yeah, they’ll figure out how to feed the robot whatever will get the robot to shut up, and then go do things teenagers do when they have no adult supervision. Great model lol.

Yes, if you want to give your kids, a solid, college-bound education, you are more likely to find it in private schools than your local neighborhood public school. However, there are some really great public schools, it just depends on where you are and what the composition of the community is. My parents live in a town where you can’t turn your head sideways without bumping into an engineer of some kind. Very diverse place. Median household income in the district is like $80,000+. Best public schools in the state.

I don’t blame parents for making individual decisions for their own children. I blame us as a wider society for our willingness to throw kids away who have themselves done nothing but have them misfortune of being born into shitty situations.

Fully acknowledge and confront the fact that public education serves as essentially a catch-all social service agency for a significant chunk of our populace and stop pretending it’s just about knowledge-transfer. For kids who come from stable family backgrounds (of whatever composition—-stability and reliability are the keys), and a stable (not necessarily affluent or adjacent—-again, stability and reliability) socioeconomic environment, that model works. Kids routinely make it to high school without being able to read or do math at more than a third grade level, because at some point, we can say well, we can’t solve society’s problems, but we also can’t “penalize” these students by holding them back several years (gotta get ground up by the economic machine as soon as they’re 18), so… well, it’s above our pay-grade. I have seen some interesting work and individual charter schools that are like “full service schools.” The problem is, for every decent idea in a charter school, there are 25 charter schools that are pieces of shit.

I need to go take a shower and get ready for work, so I’m going to stop ranting, but the basic solution is to recognize that one size does not fit all. The career tech-normie hs-gifted division we operate with is too broad-brushed. The school I’ve been at has a shit ton of profound mental health problems among students. Poverty is real but it’s not as grinding as our rival school down the street (the “super ghetto” school I was told), nor is life-threatening violence necessarily a daily companion for our kids as for theirs. Yet we are both Title I urban schools.

It’s complicated, man.

Numbers vary, but we’re on a modified block schedule, so it’s 180ish every two days. ;)

Anyway, thanks for the kind words. I’ve been pretty down about it recently because it seems like we’re just papering over deep structural and systemic problems, which just hurts our kids more than acknowledging the realities would.

I think it depends on what you mean by “engage.” Hell, I was morbidly shy in high school, so I would virtually never talk, but I was engaged with the material. It’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. With class sizes being what they are, the best I can usually do is kind of figure out 2-3 groups of students based on types and intensities of engagement and manage from there.

> Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes?

No. Title I urban school in the state’s third largest city.

> There will be some that engage….

First, if I were being nitpicky, i’d say that this assumes that it’s the student’s responsibility to take the initiative to engage with content. Rather, that’s just what the job of a high school teacher is… to lead them to a point, often sneakily, where they are engaging.

All that said, people are rather overlooking the “bad news” paragraph I included. Getting kids to at least respond to you as an individual teacher on an individual level is easy. But it’s often actively sabotaged by the systems and processes that govern day-to-day crap that happens in a public school. Sad.

I have for the past four years averaging 180-200 students on my rosters.

Try talking to them. Try asking them questions about what they think about things and then challenging them to defend it. Above all, try listening to them. Truly listening. Not call and response. Not 3-second wait time followed by “good job” or “well, not exactly.” Students today, like kids always, eagerly seek connections with people, not content. Establish that first and the rest will fall into place.

(That’s the good news. The bad news is that our education system, from federal level on down to the individual school board, will readily jump in and agree, but then require metrics and other “measurables” to show that students are cranking out “learning outcomes.” So with the best will in the world, and genuine interest in our kids and their lives as a predicate to meaningful learning in an otherwise highly artificial classroom setting, you as a teacher are stuck banging your head against an immovable concrete wall that gets refreshed annually with million dollar consultant contracts for outsiders who spend two hours every two weeks in your school to tell you what you need to do to reach your students. And at some point, you just say fuck you to all of it.)

I don’t think it’s most people’s primary motivation, which is how it sounds like you’re interpreting me.

Yes. There are, of course, plenty of people who work in the federal government who do it because it’s a job with decent benefits and so on. But there is a significant chunk of them, I would guess the majority from my dealings, who take pride and working for the government and serving the country. It’s one of the intangible benefits of the job. That’s what makes this insanity all the sadder.

Thank you, O wise one. Shall you be my guru?

You’re also insane if you’re a lawyer trusting gen AI for that. Set aside the fact that people are being caught doing it and judges are clearly getting sick of it (so, it’s a threat to your license). You also have an ethical duty to your client. I really don’t understand lawyers who can sign off on papers without themselves having reviewed the material they’re basing it on. Wild.

Reading this thread, Jesus. TIL: HN has a significant following of drug users. No judgment, y’all do y’all, but it was surprising.

There is so much written about the million different ideas for “memory of the future,” and it is exceedingly difficult to find any sober assessments of where things are at the moment. Do you know of anything to look at?

That makes so much more sense! Although the pedant in me wants to argue that calculus plural is “calculi”/“calculuses” (the dictionary gives me the latter, although I’ve never seen it in the wild myself—-but I won’t pursue that because it’s beside the point!) Thanks for the help!

Can someone please help me parse this sentence?

> Brownian motion and Itô calculare a notable example of fairly high-level mathematics that are applied to model the real world

What is “Itô calculare” supposed to have been? I am stumped. “Its calculation”?

The other wannabe Trumps don’t have the draw/sway with MAGA folks that Trump does. DeSantis tries and tries but he’s perceived as just a weirdo for the most part. Vance likewise. There’s something uniquely compelling about Trump to the MAGA crowd.

USAID was created by Congress. To get rid of it, Congress must pass a bill doing so and the president must sign it. That’s how this country’s fundamental institutions work. Don’t like it? Try to amend the Constitution. That’s what the rule of law means.

That’s kind of sweet that you think radicalization is about policy preferences. Like the GP, my elderly parents have turned into Trump partisans. They listen to Fox News all day and night. It’s constant exposure to and participation in Two Minutes of Hate. My dad’s actually a sweet guy, and when I can address some of the crazy shit he’s clearly hearing from somewhere else, and ask him to take a step back and talk to me, not at me, we often get to a place where he’ll acknowledge that what he said/repeated really doesn’t reflect his own thoughts or feelings about something, but then it’s just right back into the vortex of propaganda, lies, and hatred spewing out of the TV, and it’s like we never talked at all.

Yes, vastly better. The title as it now stands makes no sense at all.

Do you have a blog or other site where you post your writing? Your explanations are quite good and easy to follow for someone like me, an interested/curious onlooker.

I began to read this thread just for the horror-show-train-wreck voyeurism of crazy. But your simple riposte made me laugh, so, gold star, you.

There is also no financially engineered solution possible when one of the groups has final say on whether anything changes and if it does, what exactly—at least when that group gains from the status quo. Cut x number of federal programs? You’ve now also directly reduced the amount of money flowing into y number of Congresspeople, and the number of districts in which that reduction doesn’t also make reelection more (marginally) troublesome is asymptomatic to 0.

Yes, that’s why that section stood out so strongly to me, in contrast with the general frost of responses in this thread before I posted, which was, “Oh, you poor dear.” Peak HN in some ways I guess. :)

Just curious: did you actually read the whole post?

When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work.

Working for DOGE for 4 weeks, remembering the power of urgency

Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. I was immediately acquainted with the software, HR, and legal teams and went from 0 to 100 taking meetings and getting shit done. This was the day before Thanksgiving.

The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.

I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. Not by reading it somewhere. By experiencing it. I came to realize how laughable my robotics stint had been in comparison. And I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn’t the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself. I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn’t going to fix that.