Gaashk
2d ago
I agree with this take.
In my experience, the people who are really worried about decaying former company towns are also worried about places like Detroit, which used to have a higher proportion of functional, employed black men with families (they say, I'd be open to an argument that this is a myth I suppose).
The people who are really worried about good New York schools crowding out white and Asian kids in favor of racial quotas because of disparate impact are different people, much more likely to go on about "HBD," but they're probably just as upset about being yelled at on the subway by black, white, or hispanic druggies. I think these are the ones who are tired of trying to solve the druggies' problems for them, and would like them to be locked up or denied expensive, repeated medical care, and would be completely unsurprised at the stats about their average demographics.
Gaashk
2d ago
I'm pretty sure there are a few Jewish Mottizens, since it's a spinoff of SSC, and also people occasionally mention Jewish stuff, though more likely to be American.
In general, I think the moderation here is fine. It doesn't have to be all things to all people. It is true that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" doesn't always happen, but the mods do generally remind people about it.
Gaashk
2d ago
It's a really dense mishmash of a bunch of different things, any one of which might be interesting to explore, but together just kind of form an overcooked soup.
It would be much, much better with one or two concrete rightists as a foil, especially since the people who are worried about disparate impact keeping their kids out of medical school or Yale or something are in a coalition with, but distinct from, the people who are worried about their depressing rust belt family members failing to #learntocode. An adversarial but earnest take on Vance, for instance, would be more interesting.
Gaashk
2d ago
It's probably related to attributes of people who do go to movies in the evening, pay full price, and don't sneak food in for cheap in their backpacks. I'm not sure I know anyone like that, so I can't say what they're looking for in a movie. Personally, I haven't seen a movie in a theater in about a decade, and even then I went about once or twice a year (but would go when convenient and buy some snacks when I did). So the companies don't have to consider my preferences, or the preferences of people like me.
Who went to Mufasa opening weekend? Why did they do it?
Brandon Sanderson occasionally comments a bit, cautiously because he does actually want Mistborn movies, about what it's like trying to work with a big film studio, and it sounds like normal, decent, popular writers have a great deal of trouble interfacing with them, mostly because the studios change things for reasons that are their own, unrelated to the writers or audience members. There are too many fingers in the pie. That shows up when they do try to adapt popular recent franchises -- I watched Good Omens, Sandman, and The Wheel of Time, and enjoyed many things about them, especially costuming, music, credits sequences, and some of the acting. But it's really hard to keep things on track when there are so many people making decisions, some of whom care about aesthetics, and others care a lot about casting disabled angels, stuffing even more queerness into already very queer friendly franchises, getting more screen time for their boyfriend (WoT specific?), and all sorts of other things. And then maybe they get cancelled at an inopportune moment.
Gaashk
2d ago
I didn't report it and have mixed feelings about the ban, but it wasn't a good top level post.
Gaashk
2d ago
Edit to add: the title of the movie was pretty awful as well. Like who (or what) the hell is “Elio”? It gives you absolutely nothing to work with, nothing about space or aliens or anything. So matching that up with the bland art and the minimal marketing gives no hook at all to actually want to go out and see it.
I don't necessarily think that was a problem, considering how well liked Coco is, but Coco has a much better hook. There are school field trips to see live musical performances inspired by Coco, for instance, which they organize around Day of the Dead.
Luca was at least very summery, and came out when the art style was a bit fresher. I thought it was cute, and my four year old liked it a lot.
Gaashk
2d ago
Luca, Brave, Up, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world.
I felt like the biggest problem with Brave was that it didn't lean fully enough into being a Disney princess animated musical -- it needed more songs, and the relationship with her mother was a bit off somehow; she needed to talk with her great great grandmother, spinning the threads of fate up in the tower or something. Old Disney might have integrated some actual Scottish fairy tales, which were my absolute favorites growing up. The Golden Key is especially excellent.
Personally, I usually enjoy the Disney musicals more in general -- Encanto and Moana were quite fun (though I hear Wish fell flat, and haven't bothered watching it).
It would probably have worked to make a Pixar version of Stitch, that could be a lot of fun -- make it like Monsters inc, with more emphasis on Stitch and the aliens.
Gaashk
2d ago
I entered an encaustic painting for the local library art show in a couple of months; they don't have very high standards and are unlikely to reject it. I also entered some pieces for a show that has standards, and they're supposed to respond by the end of the month about whether they're accepted or not. They are oil paintings and oil and cold wax. I've been enjoying oil and cold wax lately, because of the way it allows scratching or carving back through the layers, and would like to experiment with it further.
Gaashk
13d ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
Gaashk
7d ago
I think disability actually does work that way, but suffers from benefit cliffs that disincentivize some people from doing the work that they're able to do.
Gaashk
16d ago
Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
Gaashk
14d ago
In addition to what others have said, hormonal birth control is, indeed, under explored and under discussed. If you go to a doctor and ask for birth control, she won't necessarily talk about the psychological side affects of it, and it can cause changes in sexual preferences related to hormonal cycles.
Gaashk
13d ago
I did unschooling for middle school. I did in fact run out of Terry Pratchett novels before I ran out of time. Then I read ancient Roman and Greek epics. It wasn't balanced, but it was about as good as public middle school.
Gaashk
3d ago
The new Sanderson novel, Isles of the Emberdark. It is, of course, not very sophisticated or thoughty, but is a fun little adventure.
Gaashk
13d ago
Another interesting comment from the Substack:
Jessica Lopez
As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.
There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.
This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.
N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.
Gaashk
12d ago
From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.
My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.
Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!
In some states anyway, pregnant mothers and their young children qualify for medicaid even if they are married and making the median family income for their state. Even if they already have family healthcare coverage through their employer, and nobody in their family has challenging health conditions. They not only pay for appointments, but give them toys and stuff when they go. This might be reasonable from the point of view of the state -- I'm sure dealing with complications after the fact is outrageously expensive, and making childbirth and infancy safer is one of the great triumphs of modern medicine.
I wouldn't expect the average 29 year old man to consume all that much healthcare, and if they are it's likely to be for the same reasons they're struggling to work.
Adding: I'm mildly in favor of publicly funded healthcare for sort of basic things that we're good at doing, like things requiring antibiotics, it's dumb that the 29 year old man might not go to the hospital for pneumonia because it could cost $10,000 (who knows? It's inexplicable) somehow, despite really mostly needing $20 worth of antibiotics.
Gaashk
23d ago
Sympathy for her terrible situation, sure, and it suggests there's more to the story if the husband doesn't want to live long enough to see his baby. But that doesn't mean that she should have done it. Was she suddenly worried the baby was going to inherit whatever its father was committing suicide over or something?
Gaashk
13d ago
So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.
I found an interesting comment on that by someone involved in the program:
Matt Bateman
The “brazilian teachers” are software developers and academic specialists who work on the curriculum and platform. They run the coaching calls because they are the ones who need to know what’s not working and fix it on the app side. Not sure about Brazil but some of them are indeed remote.
So that's interesting. I guess the hope is to eventually need even less human interaction, it's one of those "training your AI replacement" positions. Which brings me back to: what are the Guides doing in the morning? They've selected for kids who won't disrupt everyone to get actual human interaction, so they presumably aren't conducting classroom management. Are they spending half the day preparing the extracurricular programs?
Gaashk
12d ago
A couple of thoughts:
- Almost nobody is good at getting preferred behaviors from people who don't want to cooperate. Even good managers are not all that good at it, they refuse to hire almost everyone, and sometimes fire people when things aren't working out. Paying more sometimes helps, but there are a decent number of unemployable people out there. All of them were once children who's teachers couldn't remove them from class for more than about 10 minutes at a time unless they physically assaulted someone.
- Almost nobody is good at social science research, including actual social science and educational researchers.
- Elementary teachers are not selected for their educational research and testing abilities, they are selected for patience with small children, helping them learn to get along with each other, and the ability to work within a system that isn't all that well designed, where nobody can ever be expelled and almost nobody can be fired or demoted.
- Individual teachers can't decide anything about curriculum, schedules, or class compositions. Which are almost everything. They can conduct classroom management, and do actually iterate a lot on who sits next to whom, sticker charts, fidgets, and so on.
- "If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work." It depends on what you mean by work. If you have an unstable client who keeps freaking out and throwing things around the room and pulling random people's hair, and your method works to decrease that but not to improve other metrics, did it work?
Gaashk
23d ago
I didn't like applying for jobs at all in my early twenties, because they would always ask why I was the best candidate, and I would always feel stupid about how fake I was being and give up. So I put out some super lame applications, until someone in middle of nowhere Alaska called me and talked me into working there, and it was actually really interesting, even though it was not very pretty and -60 and I wasn't really teaching the kids all that well, and I spent hundreds of hours reading Edgar Rice Boroughs novels (I would not necessarily recommend Alaska, specifically, to someone prone to depression though).
Especially if you're American, a young man who doesn't necessarily want a family or retirement can just go do something that's interesting and low pay somewhere random for a few years. Low level English teacher abroad, Americorps, Peace Corps, pineapples, contractor for a military base; whatever sounds slightly interesting.
Gaashk
12d ago
It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.
I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.
I don't generally disagree. Some unsorted thoughts:
- Being a subsistence farmer is even less aspirational than belonging to a trade, unless it's some kind of artisanal hobby farm. It was true in the Middle Ages, and is still true, just there aren't that many subsistence farmers left in the West to aspire to joining a union. My understanding of china is that there are still enough people left who have experience debugging rice fields by hand to be relatively grateful for factory work in comparison.
- T-ball? Just looked it up, TIL.
- "Having kids will not fuck up your career [...], or for the vanishingly few female long-haul truckers." If you mean that you can get back into it after a decade or so, I suppose. But what are they going to do, take their toddler in the truck with them? The dad will do all the evening care moms usually do? This seems really unlikely, like they would just get a different job entirely.
- My impression of the trades that don't use a lot of math is that they involve quite uncomfortable conditions, such that men will avoid them when they can. There are roofers out when it's 100 degrees in summer. Plumbers are trying to fit into crawlspaces under houses or around awkward fixtures in sinks (impression from some family members who work these jobs includes yelling and cursing while trying to hold some uncomfortable position and tools that don't quite fit properly). Restaurants involve hot kitchens, cuts, getting yelled at, and unless you're the chef, low pay. If someone is the chef or runs a company, that's totally fine, nobody's asking if he's looking to switch career tracks.
- It will be interesting to see what happens now that technology can replicate emails and spreadsheets, but not holding a tool in an awkward position while water is spraying on it.
Now sure, whatever it is Mackinsey consultants actually do, it's probably more comfortable and easier than electrical linemen. But at a certain point, shouldn't we as a society go 'it takes all sorts to make the world go round, why don't we make the top of every field prestigious, give everyone someone to aspire to.
That's not how prestige works.
American folk culture told a lot of romantic stories about cowboys, lumberjacks, trappers, all sorts of things. The guy who owns the roofing company probably has a wife and kids, and the people in his church respect him. Is that not good enough for him? Some things are harder to romanticize than others, but people have been making beautiful stories about the British navy for hundreds of years, I'm sure it's possible to draw attention to the honor of HVAC technicians. Winter on the Railroad , Landsailor, Logging Song
A lot of those jobs being unusually terrible is historically contingent. Being jobs at all is historically contingent.
Much has been said about how low status it is to be a stay at home wife lately, but these are often the jobs being taken. It's nice and high status to have a Mexican maid clean one's house, hire a Guatemalan landscaper, get cheap ethnic take out, to just buy new clothing whenever there's a tear, and that all chickens come pre-plucked and gutted. Gardening, cooking, picking berries, and sewing are not necessarily good candidates for industrialization. Mass produced strawberries and chicken was probably a mistake.
Also, bras are a terrible undergarment for fat women. Bring back the chemise and stays.
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