Gaashk
51m ago
Libraries taken over by homeless seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, though, mores than night only shelters.
Gaashk
1hr ago
Based on the Asterix article, it sounded like chewing was one of the most common triggers, so apparently you're not alone. I can't really guess why, though. I would imagine that hewing used to be even worse, with older people losing their teeth?
But put me on a plane to the US with a bunch of Americans, or in a public space with Americans yakking on and on, or some random person yakking in English on their phone in Cleveland, and it's very annoying. Because I can understand every word, and have forgotten how to tune out the way I can subtly tune out Japanese speakers.
I was once on a plane near some people who were in a Young Opera Performers program, which I know because they talked about that, and about the petty drama of their cohort, and about the clothing choices of some of their cohort members, all in very loud, clear voices that carried well through the plane. I can see how possessing a loud, clear voice might be a pre-requisite for being an opera performer, but did not at all appreciate their using those voices to go on about someone's clothing choices for half an hour.
Gaashk
1hr ago
Haha, husband doesn't actually watch Big Bang, just the former housemate. He watches lots of Seth Macfarlane shows, which I sometimes find entertaining if we watch it together and nothing else is on, but I hate so much as background noise.
The new ACX post on misophonia" is interesting.
I don't particularly suffer from misophonia, and hadn't heard the term before, but used to be more sensitive than average to, especially, television shows. My former housemate would watch the Big Bang Theory, and I intensely disliked the voices of the actors, along with the voice actors from shows like American Dad and Family Guy. My husband likes to listen to the TV in the background, and mostly wears headphones for these shows when I'm around. My husband, meanwhile, is extremely sensitive to the sounds of the neighbors' vehicles, which he can hear through the rock tumbler, white noise machine, and multiple other people in the house.
Some of the comments are also reminding me of the times I tried sleeping in rooms with ticking clocks, and took the batteries of of the clock, then reset it again the next morning. I think once I tried to muffle a clock under a lot of bedding as well. This hasn't effected me lately, but that's probably just because timing clocks are no longer standard.
I was homeschooled for unrelated reasons, and I have often been confused by "sustained silent reading" regimes in some of the worse schools. A third of the kids mess around, making small noises, while the other two thirds pretend to read. Sometimes I would attempt to read, and as someone who likes reading, I always found it completely impossible for more than a page, which I would immediately forget.
Lately, I've recommended Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" a couple of times. Somehow it came up with my mother this week -- I think in the context of why I don't paint. It's not the same, of course -- reading and writing or painting in open spaces -- households and offices without walls, where it's normal and expected for anyone to talk about anything at any moment, and the person who ignores them and asks them not to is in the wrong. Both my husband and I find it rather demoralizing, and exhausting. We are angry that there is no viable way to signal unavailability to talk in a way that doesn't hurt others' feelings. I remember my father saying that he had "run out of words." I have to stop writing now, because my daughter has followed me through a couple of rooms, to talk about ladybugs. She has, as I wrote this, read out loud all the letters on my keyboard, asked for a dry erase marker, asked for a drink, and talked for several minutes about ladybugs. She is, of course, more important than writing on message boards. But I am tired. I'm not sure how to make things better and less exhausting.
Adding, since this is already stream of consciousness, that my mother does not have misophonia, either, but is also an introvert. She remembers, and sometimes mentions distastefully, how 40 years or so ago her roommate went on and on about the royal wedding. After 40 years, this is still an unhappy memory!
Gaashk
1d ago
-
Congress can still redistribute directly to the states if they want to, and probably will.
-
Student loans are already a horrible mess, and the DOE and federal government hasn't done anything to sort it out, so it's probably best we have less of them, not more. I went to community college, followed by an inexpensive state college. If those colleges don't have enough money to function in some states, the federal government can redistribute directly to them. Private scholarships are probably useful and good.
-
I work in a school, and have seem hat kinds of programs the money goes towards. They are mostly not what I would want. The DOE's priorities are not only the same priorities as most children and parents, but not even the same as most teachers. Not even the teachers of superfluous subjects.
Gaashk
2d ago
Why would you expect that? I wouldn't necessarily. I would expect it to stay about the same, since the core teachers, the children, and the states they live in will remain the same
Gaashk
2d ago
I think feminine or androgynous would be acceptable. "Trans woman" would also be acceptable. "Woman" would certainly give the wrong impression.
Whether or not it's reasonable to call Alice "Miss Smith" will probably depend on how well he passes for female. Going by the description, it sounds like people who don't know him will feel confused, and try not to use gendered terms of address, and people who know him well will simply call him "Alice," and introduce him to acquaintances as "Alice Smith." Unless they're schoolchildren, I suppose? I would prefer that he not be allowed to pull schoolchildren into his preferences, and would likely refer to him in front of my own children, in private, as Alice or Mr Smith, but not as miss.
Gaashk
2d ago
It is a little silly, and will probably be regarded with bemusement by future generations, like fake recovered memories from a generation ago. But it is also causing active havoc in the present, also like those "memories."
norms of personal presentation, for instance.
This is how we got terms like "tomboy" and "drag queen." Masculine and feminine are fine for more formal contexts.
Gaashk
2d ago
Going by the people I've known who want to work retail between getting a college degree and a serious job, Starbucks and Trader Joes are both fine with the trade off of higher turn over, but smarter, more interesting employees, and will give an immediate interview. Other companies don't necessarily respond at all. I suppose these are simply different business strategies?
Gaashk
2d ago
Education is more like this than not -- I've gotten about a third of the jobs that I've applied for. They do make people enter all their credentials into an online application with no chance to autofill, and ask for written letters of recommendation, often from one's current principal, before even scheduling interviews, though. It's also accepted to substitute teach in a school district someone wants to work in until they offer a permanent job.
It doesn't help to call and "check up," though. I suspect it might annoy the people involved, and make them less likely to hire, actually.
Gaashk
5d ago
I'm on team "it depends."
There are a lot of problems in Chicago, but the city looks pretty goody, actually. I like their Trump Tower! It has human centric walking paths around it, gardens, and places to sit. It looks pretty good from across the river! It's probably comfortable inside. The Wrigley building may be more aesthetic, but not enough to be worth passing up all those windows. I love the aesthetics of the Lurie Gardens, with a little bit of prairie, surrounded by city towers. But Chicago has always wanted to be a big American city.
I'm less of a fan of California design, especially since it's been encroaching on the Southwest, with grey houses with sharp angles taking over from the tan houses and soft edges. The Southwest should have tan houses and rounded edges! It should look like it's covered in local clay! I'm not certain what's prompting the grey and white angular houses, the owners probably think it looks "fresh" or some such thing, even if I think it's tired just five years on. Like the Catholic churches in the 70s, they age quickly.
Phoenix is odd, and not very aesthetic, but each individual person gets some nice desert landscaping, an air conditioned house, and access to a bunch of goods at one of the hundreds of identical strip malls. It isn't a city built for the past or the future, but for the present, and it will be fine if it keeps getting rebuilt until they run our of water or air conditioning units are outlawed. Tucson has more history, and therefore better architecture. Here's a church from about a decade ago. It's completely fine. Most of their newer apartment and condo developments are also just fine, in a way that pictures don't capture super well. They're safe, clean, have nice little patios full of potted succulents, and a couple of swimming pools. Nothing grand or awe inspiring, but just fine. Very livable.
I'm not sure what's happening with Toronto, perhaps like Phoenix they don't have enough history as a city? Quebec City sounds reasonably aesthetic. South Korea is more aesthetic than Phoenix, but may be a worse place to live, going by everyone's unwillingness to raise children there.
Gaashk
5d ago
I think that it's reasonable for the government to provide care for disabled children, teens, and even sometimes adults, since Americans do not live in multigenerational clans or villages, where care can be somewhat distributed. But it seems both very expensive and also rather miserable to be in a school, specifically all the time if someone isn't being educated. They aren't that comfortable, I guess they're reasonably safe and the food is acceptable, but large schools just don't seems like a natural setting for primarily providing supervision.
Gaashk
5d ago
That seems fairly similar to how things are in the US. I work in schools, but not in subjects with mandatory tests, but I get to see all the IEPs for the school, and they're mostly things about longer times for tests, breaking down instructions into shorter chunks, repeating instructions, preferential seating, and less stimulating environments (especially for testing).
The very high needs children who have a one on one aid are also on IEPs, but it's quite different situationally, even though their IEPs generally look more or less the same.
Perhaps it ultimately won't make much of a difference whether there's a national Department of Education or not, since the expectations are already there for all of the accommodations.
Gaashk
7d ago
Career and Technical Education high schools have pretty useful shop classes.
Gaashk
7d ago
It might be worth a try, even so. Hand knitting clothing out of alpaca wool or something is probably still less expensive than most of the interventions in public education.
Gaashk
7d ago
I think that number includes 504s and BIPs (behavior intervention plans), and IEPs is closer to 10%
Gaashk
7d ago
Other than the beatings, some of the “social communication” classrooms for severely autistic kids are already rather like those prisons.
Gaashk
8d ago
There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.
I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.
Some articles from the past couple days:
- "Trump's Education Secretary Doesn't Know What IDEA Is and Special Needs Parents Are Outraged"
- "As Education Department Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff, Special Ed Worries Mount"
- The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.
I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.
Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?
Gaashk
20d ago
They have been converted to the civic religion of celebrating each other's sexual preferences.
Gaashk
20d ago
Moral foundations seems like a better fit for most of these issues.
The main area for both conflict and mistake is economics. Most people want to have a bigger slice of the pie for themselves and their fellow class members. The interests of the person who wants a cheap employee or servant and the person trying to get an entry level job are not the same. The interests of the person who wants government housing in a nice part of town, and the person who already owns a house in the nice part of town are not the same. Many people also have bad ideas about how to get where they're trying to go.
I used to be very into MBTI types, because as an ITP woman, I often felt like I needed an explanation for my personality.
So if this were actually an important project for your career progression, how would you self-report to get the best potential team?
I would probably be honest. MBTI is fairly values balanced, such that there aren't universally better or worse answers. That's its main value proposition, in addition to having a more constrained number of possible results.
The problem with OCEAN, from an employee's perspective, is that it's more threatening. Employers always want their workers to be conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable. Especially conscientious. So if it were an OCEAN test, I might try to look more conscientious than I actually am.
Adding: you'd want an extroverted feeling teammate if you're planning a social event.
Gaashk
24d ago
It reminds me of Neil Howe's books about "the Fourth Turning." It's interesting and suggestive, but I'm not sure if it's accurate or not. That kind of pronouncement seems very suggestive, but also like it's impossible to figure out whether it's real or not until a decade or two later.
Gaashk
26d ago
For a while, I was part of a friends group that included music hobbyists (though I am not one). People would write their own songs, and perform them with guitars and such. It was lovely! I would certainly welcome the return of more intimate, live performance spaces.
Gaashk
27d ago
No, I'm saying that, oddly enough, the sorts of bios that highlight "not a man, a woman, no really," and stories that feature "tampon stashes" on the internet lately do not come from biological females.
I'm not saying I disbelieve you right now, just that this has been the case for several years now. This is literally the first time I've heard a woman mention tampons in relation to "actually a woman."
Apparently it moves around about 13% of education funding. It also provides some requirements, for instance around Individual Education Plans, which are fairly expensive, and mostly say things like "J will have additional time on tests" and "J will have preferential seating." They may also provide some of the rules that lead to special education positions being chronically understaffed, with entire positions unfilled for years at a time.
Despite having a kind of unnecessary fluff education job, I would still be interested to see what would actually change without them.
More options
Context Copy link