domain:betonit.substack.com
Gaashk
17hr ago
The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture
What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).
Gaashk
17hr ago
Indeed. I'm not quite anonymous enough here to talk about this in detail, but it's very much an issue. Trainings can become incredibly hollow if the administrators aren't fully on board, so that teachers don't even understand or have access to the full ideas behind what they're supposed to be implementing, even if they want to do it.
DiscourseMagnus
17hr ago
It is if you go off the beaten path of the internet. The difference you're recognizing is that the beaten path of the internet didn't used to be all that much of it insofar as it existed at all. But you'll still be bombarded with porn ads and porn spam if you use imageboards, pirate, etc.
anti_dan
17hr ago
California I would say is probably into the 28-35k range right now. How insanely expensive public school is is a major blind spot for most people I encounter.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
17hr ago
For any school in Japan, if a kid can pass the entrance exam (these can begin as early as junior high) he or she can get in. There is a 推薦 / suisen or recommendation-based or so-called "escalator" system as well for kids who begin school in, say, Takagi Goodschool elementary--they will probably then go to Takagi Goodschool JHS, HS, and even university if there is a TG University (sometimes the Takagi Goodschool is associated with a different university and is a feeder school for that one.)
If I am understanding your question correctly, yes, some children who are legacy entrants (whose parents or whatever went to Takagi Goodschool) will go there as well. But as I say, any kid can go there if they pass the entrance test. Still, you will find that some suisen students are exempted from what are sometimes considerably difficult tests (because they are athletes or demonstrate some other skill, or have a very good recommendation from someone at their high school who is a known and respected quantity.) This results in a lot of students who got in via social standing/parental influence/hereditary reasons and then some who are just really smart and/or know how to study for tests.
Not to get too much into it, but Japan has a system where low level students are filtered very early in a way that doesn't seem to happen in the US, at least not how I understood it as a kid. Here, a kid who has no real academic skill will be counseled, channeled into a JH school or then HS where none of the kids are really so academic, and they will focus on sports or trades or whatever, or be pushed to universities or junior colleges or å°‚é–€å¦æ ¡ senmon gakko (vocational schools). Of course some do fall through the cracks and become delinquents or just move into something else. Students can opt out as young as 15 (and some do, if they have no parent pushing them to continue.)
I don't know much about specifically Catholic schools, though, so there very well may be something going on there that I am not aware of.
anon_
17hr ago
Fully agree with all this, except I'd kinda put more (relative) on 1/3. In particular, there's studies that untrained individuals are not great at matching photos to people, especially grainy ones and many of them were using stolen identities of people vaguely co-ethnic to them.
Another take on the conclusion is that there is no actual system in place for verifying someone's identity in a way that works when applied by clueless or look-the-other-way very-mildly-complicit employers.
One of my coworkers suggested the simplest way would be that when you start work and do the I9 process, the government goes back and verifies with you via an independent means.
JulianRota
17hr ago
On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.
"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.
"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
17hr ago
the superior Japanese Samurai film was ripped off by the inferior Western cowboy movie!
Very similar dialogue occurs regarding Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, though of course The Magnificent Seven was a licensed rip-off of Seven Samurai. If you go even deeper down the rabbit-hole, Seven Samurai was an unlicensed fan-fiction based on High Noon (point of departure - what if Marshal Kane succeeded in getting a posse together), which itself is the plot of A Man for All Seasons put into the American west, and so-on and so-forth until you get back down to the Epic of Gilgamesh which was probably a rip-off of a popular folk tale that probably originated with some people from the next valley over.
anti_dan
17hr ago
Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.
I think people fret far too much about reading happening at home. Maybe there are some edge cases where mom reading bedtime story helps out, but the biggest issue still seems to me happening when that sperm hits that egg, and sometimes what happened during the 9 months of pregnancy. My son just like, looks at books himself. He can't read (to my knowledge there is no such thing as a kid as young as him doing so), but he recites them on his own. I can hear him in the other room "reading" books to himself. I suppose in a world totally devoid of reading at home he couldn't do THAT, but he'd be doing some other thing that smart kids do. He'd be inventing his own stories (he also does this), he be practicing whatever new thing he discovered (like skipping about a month ago). The difference in self-play amongst kids is pretty vast. The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture.
Gaashk
18hr ago
in the corporate world
Is that synonymous with "doing paid labor?" It's not usually used that way.
I tried looking up some information about this from BLS:
Mothers of younger children remained less likely to participate in the labor force than mothers with older children. In 2024, 68.3 percent of mothers with children under age 6 participated in the labor force compared with 78.0 percent of mothers whose youngest child was ages 6 to 17.
Caring for children under six is daycare more than schooling, so I'll leave that out. So apparently 22% of mothers are full time homemakers or unemployed. 3.4% of children are homeschooled, according to the internet.
What's the base rate of unemployment for women without children? I couldn't find that quickly -- the overall prime age labor force participation rate is 78% for women, the same as for mothers of school aged children, and 88% for men. So maybe there's some room for 10% of women who could be in the labor force, but aren't? Of whom 3%-4% are homeschooling?
That's not literally nobody, but someone who's going to do a good job homeschooling their kids won't be at the absolute bottom or capability, either. What are they otherwise doing while their kids are in school?
Glaukopis
18hr ago
Should note for context that 0.1mg transdermal estrogen is a cartoonishly low dose. I'm on 40x as much and it's still considered mid range dosage. I haven't had any of these sort of phenomenological effects. Calling placebo on this
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18hr ago
*Imperial Wizard 5: Seeds of Corruption (Arcane Awakening) by J Parsons.
09milk
18hr ago
As someone out of US trying to understand why is it that difficult to implement a work right verification system when every other developed country have one:
- Assuming there is a quick way to verify US citizens by birth certificate so that we can first filter out all US citizens
- Setup a system so that employees can enter passport number and visa number, to verify someone's right to work, the system should also return the name and photo of the passport holder (Legal immigrant in US must have a passport and visa, right?)
- Setup an alternative system so that asylum seekers will aquire a temporary visa with photo, so that effectively act as both a passport and visa at the same time when they are in the US
- Require employees to save a copy of employers ID documents, to avoid liability in-case of forged documentations
Isn't this the standard for everyother first world countries?
PokerPirate
18hr ago
I'm a just-received-tenure CS/math prof at a top rated teaching college. I've put in way less work than the traditional R1 faculty (but probably a bit more than what you describe). One thing I've learned since graduating is that the phd/postdoc life really only prepares you to think about R1-style academic work. But there's a huge world beyond the R1 research world that is much less intensive.
For example, there's definitely community colleges around where you live that have teaching positions you'd be qualified for. At community colleges, these positions are mostly non-tenure track these days, and won't pay a lot, but they'd definitely support a decent DINK lifestyle and give you the flexible hours to enjoy it. Based on what you described as your qualifications, there's probably proper 4-year colleges near you that you could teach at and get tenure as well.
I've been on a handful of hiring committees too at this point. If you want to PM me a CV, I'll take a look and provide more detailed feedback.
recovering_rationaleist
19hr ago
It seems like "e-verify" is just filing a simplified form I-9 (which has a field for social security number/A-number/passport number) online, and then getting a result saying that "records match" from the SSA or DHS. On Form I-9, the employee attests under penalty of perjury that they have the right to work until some date, and provides IDs to back up that claim. The employer attests under penalty of perjury that they have verified the worker's official documents which establish identity and employment authorization. This is already required for all employers. I imagine a ton of employers are not actually verifying documents and perjuring themselves, but nobody cares, because it is employers who sponsor political candidates.
According to USCIS, E-verify is different from Form I-9 in that it requires a social security number and photo identity documents, and tells the employer whether the employee is eligible to work within three to five seconds. Watching one of their tutorials for employers, the employer fills out "Name", "Date of Birth", "Social Security Number", "Employee's email address", "Citizenship status", and which documents the employee provided. (With the exception of the email address, this all duplicates information on the I-9). The employer is then prompted to upload scans of the documents provided.
So how does the program not work? How does an employer who uses it end up hiring ineligible workers? News outlets are saying that the Glenn Valley Foods CEO "explained that federal officials said his company was a victim of unauthorized workers using stolen identities or fake IDs to get around the E-Verify system."
We have a couple options here. None of them leave the employer, the immigrant, or DHS/SSA/USCIS looking very good:
-
Employees were signing up to work with scans of other people's documents. Literal identity theft, and the employer didn't catch it because they aren't actually comparing the photo on the ID to the physical person at the worksite (as they are testifying they did under penalty of perjury). This probably shows up as tax fraud later, too.
-
It's all a performative show. There is no photo recognition on the back end, or USCIS is failing to actually assess eligibility to work. Perhaps people on refugee status with scheduled court dates are automatically waived through. This one is on the US government.
-
"Photo ID" is not what you think. Form I-9 instructions and E-verify instructions both link a list of "Documents that establish identity," List B from Form I-9. These include a "school ID card with photograph" or, for minors, a "school record or report card". I can't imagine that a "school ID" is a challenging document to fake, given the number and variety of schools of higher education (includes tech schools!) around the country and how there are no standards for what constitutes a school ID. (Not to mention the number of minors who are able to buy alcohol in the US.) I also can't imagine a "report card" incorporating a photo ID, and again, they are printed by every school in the nation, and nowadays report cards are probably html files which can be modified by anyone with technical savvy before being printed off at home. So potentially all that an immigrant has to do is claim to be an under-18 refugee or college student, provide a fake ID or report card, and they can pass document inspections at a lower level of scrutiny. Again, literal identity theft, with the US government complicit. The employer must be wondering how 30% of their balding day laborers are children and students.
I think it is likely that the answer is (2). The reason this business was raided was because DHS already knew there were a bunch of people working there who didn't have the right to work. Perhaps they were previously permitted to work, and perhaps the Biden admin was letting anyone work.
In summary, I am appalled by the low standards of quality the US holds itself to for ID verification (one can also use a student ID to vote!), and I think it's possible anyone involved - immigrant, employer, or government - could be telling "motivated truths".
MathWizard
Good things are good
19hr ago
How do I accurately evaluate my worth? I'm too heavily confounded by impostor syndrome that I can't tell where it ends and my true value lies. I'm definitely below average for a Math PhD in terms of accomplishments. None of my grad-school work ended up getting published, and I've published 1-2 papers per year in my postdocs which have gotten ~5 citations each. I seem to work a lot less than my peers, and my advisor/bosses have been too busy and/or easy-going to push me, so I've kind of been coasting. That said, I am smart enough to learn stuff when I do try, and got a Math PhD, and know how to hack code together into something that compiles. I don't know what that's worth. What I do know is I'm not willing to put in the 60+ hour per week that the professors I've worked under seem to do writing grants and managing grad students and whatnot. At least not consistently, I would put in a couple long weeks if I really had to.
And I don't want to move, which drastically reduces my options. But on the other hand, the cost of living is not very high, and I'm currently DINK, so technically could survive on just my wife's job, but that wouldn't really be fair to her. On the work-life balance front I heavily lean towards the life part. Work is there so I don't starve and can afford people to do stuff like house repairs that I don't want to do.
I'm sure someone with my intelligence plus work ethic and ambition that I don't have could easily be making loads of money. However, given my constraints, is $40 an hour still an insult? My ideal position is remote, high pay per hour, few total hours, and meaningful/satisfying/moral, (I'm not phoning it in on a job that my employer expects more from), but I'm not sure what that is or if that's too many variables maximized simultaneously and I might need to compromise on some.
iprayiam3
19hr ago
IMO this comment is way too uncharitable...I'd hesitate to call it laziness.
To clear this up, I didn't call it laziness, I just listed that as a possible pragmatic blocker. My point is that it's trivially solvable in technical sense. It's really really easy to think of ways to evaluate students or have them practice learning in scenarios that AI cheating could be mitigated. It's not remotely unsolveable in that sense. But there are, to your point structural and indivdual reasons that make implementing such a solution harder.
I have sympathy for these defenses, but not infinity. If it's something any homeschool parent could solve without any innovation, then the school system needs to be able to react to in order to remain a legitimate concept. We can't just 'oh well...' cheating at scale. It needs to be treated as existential to schooling, if it's really this widespread.
There is no legitimate reason an institution of learning, can remain remotely earnest about it's mission as a concept, and still allow graded, asynchronously written reports.
Now of course many of the blockers to reacting to this are an outgrowth of similar challenges schools have faced for decades: The conflicted, in-tension-with-self mission of schooling in general. as described in the excellent book, Somone Has to Fail. Schools simultaneously trying to be a system of equality and meritocracy will fail at both.
But AI has stopped the buck passing; like so many other things, AI is a forcing funciton of exponential scale. I think if the can gets kicked any further, ever single semester, every single assignment, the entire idea of schooling massively delegitimizes itself.
Zephyr
19hr ago
I really wish I could see in AI what other people do; I recently tried to use Cursor at the recommendation of a senior developer, and I found that it was actively trying to force me down the wrong path when I was coding (I had to write a one-off web page that was compatible with some very ancient technology, and it kept trying to suggest CSS rules and autofilling text that made no sense for the use case). This has been a very consistent experience for me whenever I try to use AI for literally anything.
It's possible that I'm just not very good at prompting it, but I find that every time I start relying on it for anything, it is subtly wrong in ways that are frustrating to track down and repair.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
If you're not modifying existing plans, the architect should go through all that with you. Some architects are hacks, but those ones don't generally do custom builds. Assuming you want an architecturally correct Southern style and not some ersatz version, an architect excited to dive into the details of the exterior will be more than competent to guide you away from making the kinds of mistakes that end up in builder designed houses.
Zephyr
19hr ago
I think you could honestly do it much more easily then that; for example, you could keep all of your existing assignments, but simply tell people that you will be asking some number of random students a question about their essay/assignment/whatever at the start of the class in which you return their assignments. There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them. This would catch a good chunk of AI submitted assignments with very minimal work.
If they "cheat" and use AI anyways, but memorize enough of their assignment to answer a question? Mission accomplished; the nominal goal is to teach students the information, so we shouldn't actually care about how they learn it.
"Bugman" in this sense is meant to evoke eusocial insects, like ants and bees; the implication is that Asians, though hard-working, are highly conformist. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that.
Probably genetic; East Asian cultures have a history of collective punishment that is largely absent from the West, so if you fucked up, you didn't just get yourself killed, but your whole family; that strongly selects for conformist genes.
Bryan Caplan would not have lasted five minutes in ancient China or feudal Japan.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
Homeschooling moms are already housewives, though. Probably some would be in the corporate world if they sent the kids to public school instead but most of them are otherwise homemakers.
I think this is just your brain on the system. The system says you should graduate high school at approximately 18 years of age, then spend 4 years getting drunk and sometimes doing coursework, then go out into the workplace.
This system "works" because it is highly subsidized, and pleased the clients. Those being the 18-22 year olds who get to party, the professors who get to be paid to be lecherous, and the companies who get to externalize some of the costs of on the job training.
The rest of society loses.
But also the losers are the talented who should be done with all this silly fake education at age 16, but instead are subjected to an environment of drugs and booze when they get to campus.
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