It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.
Just as a really simplified example, let's say low-performing students in state A learn approximately 0.7 of a grade level each year, while in B they learn 0.6. State A has social promotion, while state B holds students back a year if they are doing poorly. So in grade 4 standardized testing, the low-performers in A would be working at a grade level of 2.8 (4x0.7) while in B they would be working at a grade level of 3.0 (5x0.6). Someone just looking at the aggregate stats would assume B has more effective teachers, when the opposite is true.
This probably has a pretty minimal impact since the number of students held back is in the low single digits, but it is a confounding variable.
The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%. These inter-state comparisons are really just measuring which states are better at handholding the remedial students enough to just barely feign competence.
odd_primes
3d ago
The guy who runs KiwiFarms wrote an interesting piece about digital self-sufficiency. The site itself is not to everyone's taste (lots of 4chan-style shitposting and racism) but he has had to deal with an insane amount of pressure from big tech just to run a glorified gossip website. It illustrates just how hard it is to run a website nowadays when you're blacklisted by Cloudflare, search engines, payment processors, and even T1 ISPs.
https://madattheinternet.com/2021/07/08/where-the-sidewalk-ends-the-death-of-the-internet/
odd_primes
3d ago
In terms of the slope slipperiness, Canada is expanding MAID to people suffering solely from a mental health condition. This is legally required due to a court case they lost challenging the MAID law's exclusion of the mentally ill. They have temporarily delayed this through new legislation, but eventually they will either implement it, or be taken back to court and forced to implement it. The people newly eligible will all fall under track 2.
odd_primes
6d ago
Loads, this one only came to prominence because of the recent focus on Israel/Palestine.
Personally as king of DOGE I would have abolished the TSA, fired most of them, and transferred the rest to ICE. It's an obscene waste of time and money on security theater that is universally hated, yet somehow employs over 60,000 people.
The big change is that the grant amounts have skyrocketed in recent years. When the program was created in 2004, funding was around $25 million per year. The program was proposed and lobbied for by Jewish groups. Last year the total was $454 million, and synagogues receive a disproportionate amount of funding.
https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/nonprofit-security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_Security_Grant_Program
odd_primes
6d ago
The similarity lies in the fact that they are both visibly indicated in a way the parents can use for social signalling. Right now prenatal screening is still not ubiquitous, so having a child with Down Syndrome is not necessarily a choice. Ironically that reduces its utility as a signalling mechanism. But in 10-20 years? The only people having a child with Down Syndrome will be doing so because they refused the screening, or deliberately ignored the results.
I don't think this trend will take off in progressive circles though, given how it's uncomfortably similar to evangelical Christian practice. Evangelicals will have staked out a position on this first just by being generally anti-abortion.
Obviously it wasn't intended as a 1:1 comparison, but Haiti has an average IQ of 82. A significant percentage of that difference is likely genetic, based on our current understanding of the heredity of intelligence. The mother's health and nutrition also plays a significant role, and that's outside the control of the adopting family. A young child adopted from Haiti is statistically going to be at a significant intellectual disadvantage compared to the biological children of that "wealthy white couple".
International adoptions in general come with a much higher risk of a child with physical or mental disabilities. Growing up I knew two families that did international adoptions, one from Russia and one from Asia. The Russian child had fairly significant behavioral issues and developmental delays, and the Asian child had a physical disability likely caused by prenatal or infant malnutrition.
The charitable interpretation is that these families do international adoptions out of a genuine desire to do good and provide a better home for a child, but from a utilitarian perspective it seems to provide pretty low impact compared to other forms of charity in terms of cost effectiveness. What is does provide is a very visible signal of social status and virtue, and the frequency seems to ebb and flow depending on whether it's trendy in a given community. For example, it was a trend in Hollywood in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna. At some point it fell out of fashion, and now international adoptions are practically verboten in left-wing circles, particularly if the parents are white and the child is not. The same dynamics seem to play out on a smaller scale in some Christian communities.
I could see a similar dynamic playing out with Down's Syndrome in the future, particularly for for parents wealthy enough to offload much of the care onto hired help. Let's be real, Angelina Jolie likely didn't change the diapers for all six of her kids while shooting movies every year or two.
Isn't that basically the trend of adopting children from Africa or Haiti? It's weirdly popular among white Christians, eg. Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti.
2710, top 16%. Scored 0 on three rounds, due to
Edit: looks like the same questions when I refreshed? Put the answers in spoilers just in case.
odd_primes
10d ago
One time this topic came up in a group setting with men and women, and all the women (plus one gay guy) were shocked that the straight men did not find Zendaya that attractive. They were saying 9-10, while we were more like 6-7. She definitely has a unique look, but personally I found Rebecca Ferguson much more attractive in Dune, despite her being over a decade older.
odd_primes
10d ago
Markle is a bit of a stretch, her father is white and her mother has mixed ancestry. She's at the point where she could easily pass as Italian or Spanish.
odd_primes
10d ago
The study most people reference is a 2018 study by Denmark's finance ministry:
It's in Danish, but there are plenty of secondary sources discussing it in English, eg. the linked article in The Economist.
The entire purpose of Israel's exercise of government-like power has been to prevent Gaza from leveraging resources or building state capacity in a way that would harm Israeli interests. That's obviously challenging, since it goes against the will of the vast majority of Gaza's population, and they have had to maintain some degree of pretense that Gaza is self-governing to appease the international community. October 7 broke that balancing act, because Israel is now exercising it's authority in such a blatant way, and has created such a severe humanitarian disaster, that the international community can't turn a blind eye anymore. The UK and Canada are threatening to recognize Palestine as a state now, this would have been unthinkable five years ago.
Just to clarify, when referring to governmental or government-like, I'm describing how Israel de facto controls many elements of modern statehood for Gaza and the West Bank. Eg. Defense, law enforcement, taxation, regulation of the movement of people and goods, medical care, etc. They effectively have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That does not mean complete or universal control over all elements of Palestinians' lives, just that they hold onto many of the authorities that would normally rest with the government of an independent entity.
odd_primes
12d ago
I'll address the culture war point, since other people are far more qualified to talk about the issues with the P320's internal safety. Ron Cohen, the current CEO of Sig Sauer, was previously the CEO of Kimber. There is a perception that he aggressively cut costs and relied on Kimber's strong reputation to sell sub-par products at a premium price point, cashing out before consumers caught on. Now he's at Sig, and strangely enough a formerly well-respected brand appears to have aggressively cut costs and are suffering quality control issues while coasting on their strong reputation... It's starting to look like a pattern. People would be pissed with Cohen no matter what, but the optics of a Jewish CEO deploying the private equity looting playbook on popular brands has resulted in the sort of backlash you'd expect from certain corners of Twitter.
odd_primes
13d ago
But they exercise a great deal of authority over Gaza and the West Bank, and treat those people far worse. Israel exercises all the power over Palestinians that a national government would, but denies them any representation in that government.
Just off the top of my head, they perform law enforcement, control trade and the flow of goods (including a naval blockade of the Gaza strip), control the movement of people, collect taxes... All the traditional responsibilities of a state.
odd_primes
1mo ago
The Harvard Law Review published an analysis of the case that was largely supportive of Mackey after the trial court decision. Even as a non-lawyer I found it pretty informative and comprehensible. They mention some potential issues with the jury instructions, as the judge failed to address the issue of parody.
odd_primes
1mo ago
Dumb influencers aren't unique to TikTok. Years ago people were eating Tide Pods and posting the videos to YouTube or Facebook, and influencers have been shot while messing with strangers for "prank" videos. All of these platforms moderate content like this, but it's a cat and mouse game with users who want to evade the filters. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are copycat services offering the same short clip style of content, with the same issues.
It's a bit hard to take the TikTok moral panic seriously when the main driving force for the ban was US tech companies mad that they were being disrupted (or looking to buy the distressed asset for a discount), and it only took off thanks to AIPAC and the ADL getting upset that TikTok refused to aggressively moderate pro-Palestine content. The content can be dumb, but I don't think a sufficient case has been made for banning the service on national security grounds.
odd_primes
1mo ago
This one? For some reason I vaguely remembered the same photoshop. It was on the first page of Brave's image search. https://ifunny.co/picture/breaking-news-breaking-hoes-mad-pep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i-yCRb3GSP7
Schools are supposed to be assessing learning on a more thorough, ongoing basis. If a student can't read at their grade level, that should be made very clear to the parents repeatedly throughout the year. The point of standardized testing is to keep the schools honest and get information on relative performance between schools or districts.
With respect to the bottom 10-20%, spending huge amounts of resources to get someone from a grade 4 reading level to a grade 5 reading level won't help them avoid getting swindled by someone with a law degree. Also, I suspect that there is a very significant overlap between the people who cannot read a basic contract, and the people who would not understand such a contract even if it were explained to them. The latter category cannot function independently in modern society and likely need some form of assisted living arrangement to help them navigate daily life.
More options
Context Copy link