NewCharlesInCharge
No bio...
User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Not deporting a high profile person openly advertising their illegal status sends the message that you can be shielded from deportation by becoming a pro illegal immigration activist.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Years ago my big tech employer did a terrible job at planning restrooms in a new building we moved in. They didn’t accommodate for how male skewed we are and ended with a situation where the ratio of women to fixtures was something like 5:1 and for men it was around 50:1.
Every time I needed a toilet I found myself bouncing to different floors to find an unoccupied stall.
In one corner of one floor we had layout where there was a multi occupant men’s room with a urinal and a stall, and a single occupant ladies room. To try to ease the pain on overcrowded men’s rooms the company made the single occupant women’s room into a gender neutral bathroom.
A number of women raised hell about the message that sends to women. Never mind that women virtually never have to wait for a free toilet while the men constantly do. The women’s feelings on the matter were more important, and the sign was changed back.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
A left group did put out those cringe ads which amounted to “vote for us or they’ll take away your porn”: https://nypost.com/2024/10/28/us-news/x-rated-dem-campaign-ad-claims-gop-wants-to-ban-porn-nationwide/
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
He gets a lot of credit for having been a political prisoner.
NewCharlesInCharge
24d ago
Biden is in an irregular marriage.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I think the person you're replying to is referring to the whole language approach to reading. The popular implementations of this eschew phonics entirely, and instruct kids to use only context clues and pictures to figure out what word is on the page. The "Sold A Story" podcast dives deep into the origins of this and its many failures.
It's a great podcast, highly recommended. Among other things I learned that even this topic is culture war. George W. Bush's push for phonics based instruction was resisted hard by educators, apparently because it was coming from W.
Also very revealing in how much of education is driven by trendiness and personality cults. A dumb fad like Reading Recovery can damage a whole generation.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
The Department of Education doesn’t tell states, districts, schools, colleges, or any other institutions how they have to educate anyone. But it has always insisted that they try.
Off the top of my head:
-
Title I funding incentivizes concentrating impoverished students in great enough numbers to qualify for the funding. There’s a cliff where the funds just go away. I’ve seen this play out when our district was redrawing school boundaries, it was the top priority.
-
Dear Colleagues
-
Making funds contingent on keeping kids in or out of the proper locker rooms
-
Throwing ESSR funds at districts that almost universally used them to fund new permanent programs and then begged for more funding when the always-temporary funds expired
There’s just a ton more strings attached funds that lead to administrative bloat and generally incentivize schools to chase things that aren’t all that useful except that they get rewarded with funds
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
If we get down the physics of it all the difference is that the latest gen nvidia chips can do more matrix calculations for a given amount of power.
Yet China is already at 3X the USA’s power generating capacity and grows by about a whole USA’s worth of capacity every 18 months.
And Chinese industrial policy is more nimble. If they decide to prioritize data centers they can just do that. In the USA private industry is squabbling over limited generating capacity and starting to plan for on site generation.
NewCharlesInCharge
22d ago
On one hand I believe that prayer is God allowing man the dignity to participate in His own divine will. God will grant your petitions insofar as they align with His eternal unchanging will.
On the other hand, as a Catholic, I believe that intercessory prayer is worthwhile.
I suppose to reconcile the two I could frame intercessory prayer as vibing with the saints together to be part of God’s will.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
FWIW I’m still getting plenty of recruiter chatter as a backend / infra engineer, but that’s with about twenty years experience, half at FAANG. I’d say a plurality of the reachouts, when the end employer is identifiable, are in the financial sector.
Though yeah, it won’t be long before I’m managing a team of AI agents, and then eventually an AI is managing a team of AI agents that replaced me.
I don’t know what to tell my two year old career wise, I’m focused on giving him a good moral foundation first. He has signs of being the kind of student I was, so I think he’ll probably figure it out better than I could. My exposure to upper class jobs was almost all via television, so my ambitions were to be either a doctor or lawyer. I had considered computer science as a fit for my natural talents, but Newsweek convinced me that was a dead end industry and all the jobs are moving to India. Then I spent about a week in a hospital with a serious injury, decided I didn’t want to spend any more time in a hospital, and chose a major suitable for law school.
And then ended up as a software engineer anyway.
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
Occupying government buildings to coerce a political outcome was merely planned by the Proud Boys and they got decades in jail for it.
They're only out now due to pardon, the laws are still on the books and available to the Trump DoJ.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I don't think it's clear that American foreign policy has been, in the long run, to reduce nuclear proliferation.
If I were a leader of a country contemplating a nuclear weapons program I'd look at the examples of Kim and Qadaffi.
America made a bunch of noises against North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons, and has imposed sanctions in response to its success. But in the end this appears to have secured North Korea against military intervention.
Contrast with Qadaffi, who on his own accord negotiated to end his WMD programs in consideration for normalizing diplomatic relations and lifting of sanctions. He was rewarded with what was a likely color revolution that resulted in a knife in his ass.
So do you want to be Kim or Qadaffi? The winning move seems to be to develop your nuclear program in secret, or under very heavy fortification, so that it can't be preemptively destroyed. Then once you have your nukes, the West will leave you alone.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Districts also have professional development budgets that firms are competing for.
In my district every Wednesday is an early release day so teachers can participate in professional development. This has got to be the only job in the world where 10% of your time is spent on training and you only work 9 months a year.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
Had it been universal it would have been very Catholic of him, which isn’t something you can often say.
Awhile back I learned from The Pillar that his marriage isn’t even canonically valid. He and Jill were married in some random non-Catholic chapel, and never obtained a convalidation.
Jill also has a still living husband from a previous marriage that was never annulled.
So forget the politically charged question of whether he ought to be denied communion for his many public statements that conflict with church teaching. He ought to be denied for the plain reason that many others are: he’s publicly living in sin.
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
Drastic surgery is not always better than the alternative.
Plenty of people out there have been made worse off from unnecessary surgeries.
Awhile back I was having some back issues. Saw a surgeon who leveled with me that he could justify surgery, but he could do it for just about anyone my age, almost everyone's got some disc abnormalities that will show on an MRI. He told me that the outcomes from surgery would almost certainly be worse than non-surgical options. And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
It wouldn’t eliminate the problem, but the proctored exams could filter out many of the people who wouldn’t be able to hack it but for cheating.
Or maybe even force them to learn how not to cheat.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Even worse, the funding is contingent on abiding the federal government’s whims.
Under Biden schools risked losing their funding for not accommodating transgender kids in bathrooms and on sports teams.
Now it’s probably going to be the opposite.
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
Me as well. One riot with one death, and on the rioting side. And then the winning side ultimately gets to govern without bureacratic hamstringing.
Compared to years of rhetoric and investigation into "Russian collusion" that turn out to have been sourced to a document paid for by the opponent's political campaign. And then a whole summer of riots all around the country with billions in property damage and many more than one death.
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
Requiring a response violates the Privacy Act (congress makes all sorts of rules that limit the executive in various ways)
This seems too absurd to be true but it's apparently not even the most absurd bit of this law. The federal government is restricted from collecting PII on its own employees, which includes mere names and email addresses, without it being necessary to accomplish a purpose authorized by law or executive order.
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
I don’t think you can. One of the most “institutions are untrustworthy” moments was public health telling us that gathering in the thousands to protest for racial justice was okay because racism was more pernicious to public health than COVID.
But if we weren’t protesting for racial justice then we had to stay home, not visit our dying relatives or attend their funerals, and certainly not gather for mere socialization.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
The media had also successfully painted Trump's handling of COVID as inept, enough so that when Trump said the vaccine was likely to be out before the end of the year that was treated as just another lie.
In reality Operation Warp Speed did succeed, and it was only via shenanigans that vaccine approvals were delayed until after the election.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
It's the perogative of the executive to conduct foreign affairs, with explicit carveouts to Congress for the approval of treaties, appointment of ambassadors, and declarations of war.
For example, the normalization of diplomatic relations with China was executive action, both by Nixon and Carter.
So it is within the President's authority to say "I recognize Tren de Aragua as a competing government engaged in civil war against the internationally recognized government of Venezuala. And I further assert that they are sending agents to invade our territory."
I suppose this would also open up to all of the gang members to prosecution under FARA.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?
As an industry professional, this is a terrible idea. We can’t even reliably secure private systems where the consequences of failure can be ruinous to their owners. These systems are too complex and the incentives are too great to find holes to exploit.
Even if we could somehow guarantee that the servers were bulletproof, attackers would still have a vast exploitable surface in the clients.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
I've expressed before that veterinary care has a lot of medicine, especially the business side, figured out better than humans.
Insurance, for the most part, really is for the big stuff that can't be anticipated, and is priced as such. It's $60 a month to insure my 14 year old beagle with 50% coinsurance. It doesn't cover the cost of exams or checkups. It does cover things like surgeries and cancer treatment.
I once used it for a spine surgery. The total cost was about $7,000, quoted upfront. I paid about $3,500 and the insurance covered the other half. This would have been well into hundreds of thousands of dollars if performed on a human.
I was able to have conversations via email, not through some dumb HIPAA compliant portal.
That most dogs are uninsured probably keeps costs down, as does that typically pet insurance has a higher coinsurance figure than human insurance. There's an unavoidable principal-agent problem that we exacerbate with regulations that practically remove all incentive for people to price shop.
I’m reminded of the young men marching off to the Great War, excited at the prospect of winning glory, and finding a meat grinder.
There’s little glory in pushing the button. Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button, but it’s still of a different kind than a hoplite would have experienced.
More options
Context Copy link