At least the drug test is on brand. Stupid, but in a way I’ve come to expect. I cannot fathom what the point of the pregnancy test was.

Usually I say “don’t mistake incompetence for malice” because so often when people fuck up, they aren’t doing it to be mean but just because they’re stupid.

In this case, though, you’re mistaking malice for incompetence. Everything Reagan fucked up was 100% intentional. I mean, punishing black people and poor people was basically a campaign promise.

They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.

For a long time, I’ve just assumed this was a weird way that my bipolar and my bisexuality interacted. Is this just a normal human thing?!

Please don’t say Trump is in decline. Plenty of people thought Trump had no chance of winning in 2016. He is a serious threat and should be treated like one until at least 10 years after his death.

This feels like bad data to me. Don’t get me wrong, I support it. It’s just that if you’re going to determine if the raise in wages “took” jobs, it’s not whether there was a gain at all but rather how California fares compared to other states, right?

That is, if restaurants went on a massive hiring frenzy country-wide due to an increase in fast food consumption everywhere, but other states had a much larger increase, it would suggest though not prove that the increase in wages caused fast food restaurants to hire less actively in California.

I suspect that’s not the case, but I just don’t like passing off incomplete data as proof of something.

I like async but dislike await. I spend entirely too much time on everything I build trying to maximize how much I can do in parallel because I find it tremendously satisfying.

I’m more irritated that so many people use his disability as an “excuse.” If he were the most average, neurotypical boy in the world, it would still be perfectly normal and acceptable to get excited and emotional about his father potentially being the next vice president.

I was a Sega kid in the Genesis generation. A friend of mine got a Saturn and I so desperately wanted to like Nights because it was the thing for Saturn. I didn’t like it at all. It felt hard to control, hard to understand, and was just not pleasant for me.

Meanwhile, a different friend and I had a blast trading off playing Mario 64. Hands down, way better for a 9 year old me.

Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.

I caved and got an A11y on sale. I explained why I think those games are trash, but at the end of the day I caved to peer pressure that wasn’t even directed at me. On the plus side, we can play stuff together in the same room now.

Overconfident is an understatement. I remember people thinking that Trump was the end of the Republican party, some people actually said that the party would be forced to disband after their crushing defeat in 2016.

Even many Democrats didn’t like Hillary, but the idea of Trump winning was outright laughable to many. I think that combination of “I don’t want to vote for her” and “there’s no way she can lose” left a lot of people at home twiddling their thumbs instead of going out to vote.

We totally did try pure capitalism. It mostly led to naked children in coal mines (because their clothes would get stuck on the sides of the super narrow mining shafts, you see) and pepper with iron fillings (because scrap iron was cheaper than actual pepper). Also a lot of other horrifying stuff, but those two have always stuck out to me.

I keep arguing this and people don’t like it. The pain is necessary, we need people to be inconvenienced so they demand we solve the problem. Our greatest enemy is little stopgap solutions that kind of help people now at the cost of their future, like subsidizing oil to make gas prices cheaper.

It really sucks that people who are already having a hard time, people who don’t have money or time, are going to be the first to feel the pain. There’s definitely things we can do to help, but we all know that at least America isn’t going to do those things. I just don’t see a better way. Kicking the can down the road isn’t going to help them either, it’s just going to put them in a worse spot later.

I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you but, based on your positions, you’re absolutely the crazy uncle. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you were drunk when you watched the 93 Super Mario.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

He’s always been a contrarian. It was harmless and even enjoyable in the 90s and early 2000s when, to him, that meant eating vegetarian and believing in some Hippie woowoo bullshit while being firmly against organized religion and generally distrustful of corporations.

I miss hippie Scott Adams. Weird right-wing Scott Adams is not enjoyable.

I’m not a lawyer or politician but this sounds brilliant to me. If the company is responsible for paying taxes for any received tips, without being able to garnish the tips to pay it, then you’re effectively putting more money in the hands of the staff but also making accepting tips over paying workers less practical. I love it.

Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.

I would argue that your points about kids not caring and forgetting information are not inherent to the concept of education, but to how most places do formal education.

Humans learn best through practical examples that affect their lives, and through doing things. Sitting people down and giving them information, and then later having them regurgitate that information, is just not the best way. It’s cheaper, it requires fewer teachers and fewer resources, but it is not the most effective.