domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
9m ago
I like being more open about my life when posting but don't want to make it too easy to connect enough breadcrumbs to dox me. I was extremely hesitant to share personal stories in /r/themotte because of my profile's ties to my location.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
9m ago
At the beach I read Cheated about the Astros sign stealing scandal in MLB. One of the prime movers, who has been more or less shuffled out of the game as a result, was Carlos Beltran, and the book goes into his life story a lot. Like a lot of Latino players, he was signed into American pro-baseball with very limited English skills, and Beltran has always been noted as a smart, cerebral player. He was frustrated by his lack of ability to communicate, he felt like he had a head full of thoughts and no ability to tell them to anyone in the clubhouse. At best, minor league clubs might have one bilingual coach per team, and that was purely a matter of luck. 17-19 year old Caribbean players were trying to learn English on the fly, while also adapting to living in a new country, and learning the professional game.
Beltran always experienced this as a personal insult, hated that he couldn't speak to his teammates and communicate his ideas. It weighed on him every day in the minor leagues, he suffered under the shame of not being able to speak clearly. He hated it, he wanted to be able to speak and he couldn't. It was a black mark on his whole life at the time. As a star player and popular union rep later, he lead the way to instituting a policy by which every team kept a Spanish Language Interpreter on staff, the way they had for Japanese players customarily for years before. Beltran was proud of the policy, sometimes considered it his greatest accomplishment as a player.
And what struck me about the story was this: Beltran's story wasn't so extraordinary. Thousands of young Latino players had come up in the minors, as teenagers, with no English skills. And they struggled like Beltran did. And probably a hundred of them* had done as well as Beltran had in the majors in terms of success, prominence, leadership. And yet most of them hadn't taken not knowing English as a personal affront. They didn't experience it as a real problem that needed to be solved. It took Carlos Beltran to do that.
And I've been thinking about why that is. What is it that makes one person experience an affront to their race/ethnicity/group as a personal suffering, and another it slides right off? What makes one white man watch Cheerio commercials through gritted teeth, and another laugh knowingly and figure things are fine? What makes one black guy just try to live his life and get ahead, and another view every outside force as a microaggression? What makes one Latino switch hitting centerfielder say "This is an outrage" and another say "Eh, whatever?"
I'm working my way through Chris Isherwood's Berlin Stories, the book that the play Cabaret was based on. I highly recommend it. It's a really fun book, filled with not a little political insight into Weimar Germany, but mostly hijinks and picaresque. Incredibly gay, but then so were the Nazis at the outset, so plus one for pride month I guess.
I also started, but for obscure reasons am not yet finishing, Path Lit By Lightning. For a variety of personal reasons, I've always known of the stories of Jim Thorpe, so when I saw this get so many glowing reviews, I figured I'd get to it. I can see why it was so well reviewed: it's a real four quadrant book. It's an old sports book, like Monsters of the Midway or 61 or Bottom of the 34th, which is going to appeal to dudes. It's telling a progressive story of racial oppression and overcoming bias, so it's got the liberal bent. It's an investigative reporting into revisionist history with quality research going into it. And it's just a good personal biography of an interesting guy. Really works from any angle. One thing I didn't realize from prior stories: the reason Carlisle Indian School consistently beat Ivy League football teams was partly the talent and spirit of the players, partly the coaching of legend Pop Warner, but also partly that Carlisle wasn't really a college so much as a combination high school/college/vocational/finishing school with no real set curriculum or year of graduation. A lot of their players were in their mid-20s, or had unclear birth certificates. So while the Ivies were fielding 18-22 year olds, Carlisle was rolling out grown-ass 25-26 year olds. Those are important years, from a football perspective.
*Beltran is essentially 100th overall in career bWar, but he never had great playoff success or was the best player on great teams, so I think a lot of other Latinos like El Duque or Aroldis Chapman might deserve greater career credit even if they were lesser players on an overall career basis.
dovetailing
12m ago
In all seriousness: find a private tutor that works with gifted kids. It won't be cheap -- you can expect to spend somewhere in the $50-$200 per lesson range -- but it will be cheaper than an actually good private school, and while he won't have the peer group, at least he'll have someone who is capable of working with his educational needs. (Though it sounds like you personally may have this covered with homeschooling -- and that's awesome if you do.)
My wife actually does some of this (she also works with struggling kids too, since there's a lot more demand for that kind of tutoring), and for a while had a student in almost exactly your situation (down to the region of the country) -- a second (?) grader doing roughly sixth grade level math (though of course they were not using a normal curriculum). Unfortunately the student had to quit because something happened and the family could no longer afford it, I think.
The main reason that most schools are not willing to do anything for gifted kids is that there's so little real demand for it that they can just not bother. Even most parents of gifted kids are not willing to really invest, and are satisfied with the kid getting As and being in a million activities. Or they are more concerned with their kids maxing out the metrics in the system they are in -- grades, test scores, impressive sounding extracurriculars -- than with actually getting them the best education. Either way, accommodating the real needs of gifted kids is not on the schools' radar because it's not the parents' priority.
PS: If anyone reading this has an elementary or middle school age kid who is gifted in math, can meet before 7 PM eastern time, and is able to handle doing tutoring lessons over Zoom, DM me -- my wife might be interested. (Yes, Zoom is not as good as in person, but she's had a lot of experience with it at this point and can make it work surprisingly well.)
PPS: If you are homeschooling an elementary aged kid who is gifted in math and are not using Beast Academy, do yourself a favor and look into it. My wife swears by it as a gifted curriculum, and you can either (a) just buy the books and use them for homeschooling, (b) enroll in an online class through Art of Problem Solving, or (c) find a private tutor (like my wife) who is familiar with it to work with your kid.
zeke5123a
21m ago
I actually think Trump is less bad compared to the Clinton, Bushes, etc. He is also more vulgar and doesn’t “hide it” as well.
But think of how many relatively poor people go into politics and leave crazy wealthy.
Shrike
33m ago
IR sensors are absolutely fantastic, until, say, it rains. Very good to have, not reliable in the way radar is (radar has its own problems, of course).
Yes, the B-21 probably won't be able to do missions into actually contested airspace. The question is if it can get to within a couple hundred miles (LRASM; longer with in-development hypersonics) of the contested airspace and release its weapons. Stealth has never been absolute; the Russians and whoever have always been able to detect our B-2s and F-117s and F-22s, the question has always been about whether the stealth gives strike packages the extra edge they need to get within weapons-release range and get out.
The Russians have arguably the best integrated air-defense systems in the world (in Ukraine they scored a 90+ mile kill against a target flying <50 feet off the ground) and very impressive long-range air-to-air missiles fired from the world's fastest acknowledged aircraft with a radar antenna the size of a dinner table (100+ mile kill recorded) and the Ukrainians are still successfully running airstrikes against them using non-stealthy aircraft designed by the Soviets in the 1970s. I think the bomber will get through, the question is just if it's going to be effective. And unlike, say, a tank battalion, it only takes a single missile to render a ship combat ineffective. So I think the B-21 will probably be an effective weapon in the sense of being able to reach weapons release point (at least vs. China in a Taiwan scenario – albeit with some limitations) the real question in my mind is the relative effectiveness of US anti-ship missiles and Chinese anti-missile defenses.
(Source for Russian SAM/interceptor performance, see pages 20 - 21.)
dasfoo
34m ago
- The reason for the description of the payments was to conceal Cohen's crime. Trump could hardly put "Reimbursement for unlawful campaign contribution" on the checks!
Do you think Trump would intentionally commit a crime to help Cohen? If so, you hold him in higher esteem than I do.
hydroacetylene
36m ago
Just to let you know- my memory of Catholic schools was there was no gifted and talented available at all. There was honors/AP classes available in high school for some subjects, and that was it.
Stellula
41m ago
As I remember from the bcash fork back in the day, you should basically just have a wallet which works on both the bitcoin and bcash chains.
Like if you import your private key into a modern client that supports bcash, you should just see a balance there that you can move to an exchange and sell.
hydroacetylene
42m ago
Thanks, that sounds very interesting indeed.
dasfoo
43m ago
It doesn't look like everyone (or anyone, really) at Dominion is twirling their moustaches and cackling as they disenfranchise the American people. It looks like they run like a standard tech company, which is to say all over the place, constantly fighting fires and doing the needful to get their sales. I'm sure 2020 was a complete nightmare scenario for these guys, where suddenly all their customers are radically transforming their deployments and doing novel, untested, gigantic-scale absentee and mail balloting.
Since I got downvoted for this skepticism, I think this is key part of the above explainer. Yeah, it sounds like routine software company patchwork, but it's a big leap from there to actionable claims of fraud. "Stop the Steal" is as dumb a mantra as "Most Secure Election Ever." They aim to convince through emotional appeal backed only by weak insinuations. For the kind of election fraud claimed by Stop the Stealers, you do need to find a couple of moustache-twirling villains intentionally changing vote counts through illicit means, not just the implications-without-accusations listed above.
non_radical_centrist
46m ago
I think you're making good and accurate points and it's a shame you're getting downvoted. But there's one point I disagree on.
The unlawful means in question were Cohen making a payment to Stormy Daniels in order to conceal her story from the public in order to prevent it from damaging Trump's election chances.
I don't think this should actually be considered a crime. As I understand it, Cohen pled guilty to it. I think that was part of a plea deal and he just took it because the way plea deals work is that he wouldn't actually receive a better outcome by trying to insist that one, but only one, of the things he was being charged with was false.
But looking at the actual law, the idea that concealing information which could damage Trump's campaign is a campaign contribution is silly. If you're that loose with the standards, practically anything would be a campaign contribution.
bolido_sentimental
47m ago
I would like to read the female version as well.
ControlsFreak
47m ago
To be completely honest, as someone who doesn't really participate in the IQ/HBD wars, this mostly sounds like regular petty whining that all sorts of people have lists of for their pet issues. When I've looked at the actual comments people cite for their similar claims, my statements hold.
Shrike
52m ago
The F-35 has a 750ish mile combat range, which can be extended by in-air refueling. You can tack another, say, 100 - 200 miles onto that with an anti-ship missile, so a carrier strike group could hang out midway between Guam and Taiwan and launch effective strike packages against targets in the Taiwan strait. And one thing that the war in Ukraine has proven is that stealthy cruise missiles launched by low-flying aircraft can evade layered air defense, so our assumption should be that this strategy is at least somewhat effective. Of course, the US can also sortie effective strike packages from CONUS, but they will take a lot longer to get to the target.
The "cheap drones" you mention the Chinese using will be Predator-style drones – quadcopter types won't have the range, you'll need large, long endurance surveillance assets – basically unmanned U-2s. Which means they show up very nicely on every radar within a couple hundred miles and a fighter will likely show up and dispatch you before you get within range of the carrier. Optics aren't necessarily particularly effective maritime search assets anyway, as you mention you really want long-range radar, but that's 1) expensive, 2) prone to being spoofed, and 3) lets everyone know you are out looking for a carrier well before you can actually find the carrier, if their electronics are working correctly. You can try to build a stealthy drone to mitigate these problems but at this point you're no longer a cheap drone, and probably not a cloud. And, well, see how well WWII-style search patterns worked out for the participants in WWII.
Now, I'm not saying that a carrier battle group couldn't be spotted in such a manner. I'm just saying it's not an easy win.
Something that might be is over-the-horizon radar. I'm not sure how effective that would be, or what limitations it might have.
The big advantage the US has re: space is that it can just put more space-based recon in space pretty quickly. At least, I assume that's what the X-37 is for. So quite possibly you could see a situation where China knocks down all our satellites and we just put up a maneuvering recon asset that they can't touch the next day.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
59m ago
Not only is this Gell-Mann amnesia, it's the literal ur example of it
Nope. Want me to explain why not?
Aside from that, you are making a fully general argument against trusting any sort of institutional reporting, ever. I wouldn't blame you for not reading the article - it's long - but I don't see how you can be this critical in good faith without having read it.
As for the NYT, it gets plenty of details wrong, but it's better than most other American institutional media, and most of its bias comes from selective omission and overt editorializing. If the NYT says that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, I'll believe them. If NYT says that Trump fell down the steps and hit his head and died, I'll believe them. If they print a quote saying "Trump will take the vote away from women", I'll believe them that someone said those words, although the person might have been reading from a script provided by the reporter.
why do you trust them with the equivalent reporting on another country
Why do you think they said that? I certainly didn't say that, and I don't recall them saying it either. But again, it's a long article, maybe it's in there somewhere. Someone would have to read it again to find out.
it would take actually living here to get it.
Again a fully general counterargument with no reference to any details.
Israeli politics is tribal, and foreigners don’t understand the tribal landscape. The religious right gets most of its power from the “zionist religious” portion of the population, which is mostly a religious caste. There’s competition over who gets to wield this power, but it’s basically a constant portion of the population that they get to “represent”. That’s with a small caveat, that Likud also has representation from the religious right these days so they’ve also started siphoning those votes a bit.
This isn't new, or unique to Israel. It has a history in America, although it's harder to see with our FPTP system incentivizing 2 parties, and the increasing nationalization of politics is destroying it, but I remember people who lived in it. It didn't always have the religious angle, but most were close enough. There've been political machines, one-party counties, locally dominant religious groups, political dynasties, and in general, groups of people who vote one way because that's just what people like them do. The ones I'm most familiar with are varieties of "yellow dog Democrat" types in the South. They voted for a particular type of person, for particular reasons. Some of those reasons were more innocent ("I don't like my home being burnt to the ground") and some were not.
And a relevant similarity is that some people categorized as this group were also associated with low-grade terrorism against a disenfranchised population. That is, the various incarnations of the KKK, other similar groups, and independent actors. You can think of it as concentric circles. The circle of people who actually went out and did terrorist stuff was small. The circle of people who provided support and aid was larger. The circle who did neither, but approved of the results of the terrorism, was larger still. And largest was the circle of people who didn't participate, didn't help, didn't even approve, but still provided cover and stonewalled any attempt to stop the terrorism. Because they were still members of the group, and loyalty to the group is a high virtue, and you don't betray members of the group to outsiders.
And that's exactly what the article reminds me of. (Notice I didn't say that the article said that?)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
Unitarian Universalist if they are "spiritual but not religious" but still like to go to church, United Methodist if they consider themselves Christian.
dasfoo
1hr ago
National review has basically said this is BS (but Trump did himself no favor with bad legal counsel). That is what establishment republicans think.
I'm essentially a NR republican of the Jonah Goldberg Remnant variety. I am anti-Trump in that I think he is cultural poison and I will(have) never vote(d) for him. I agree completely with the NR consensus on this.
The problem with the "This will kill Trump" viewpoint is that it sees Trump in a vacuum, as a uniquely corrupt outlier. My view is that is he is the "naked" exampled of the corruption already pervasive in elite politics. Everything he does or tries to do or wants to do is completely routine and no more dirty than what the Bidens/Clintons/Pelosis have been doing for decades. And probably the Bushes, Obamas, etc.
The difference that Trump offers is that he is simultanously pettier/dumber/incompetent at everything he does AND he has none of the friendly institutional cover afforded to the elite club and their competent lawyers and knowlegable operatives. They have a system that they know how to navigate, litigate and obfuscate, and Trump doesn't know that he needs to know how to work that system to succeed.
So, when the proposition comes up: Does this change your opinion of Trump? The answer to even mainstream Republicans is, "This makes no difference, because the other guys are just as bad, and maybe worse because they're good at being that bad and getting away with it."
If Trump going down is the draino that unclogs the swamp and he takes them all down, this maybe isn't so bad. If he's the only one who makes it through the drain, this is a sort of travesty of selective justice.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
Accurate. Me and most of my Blue tribe circle would check at least half those boxes.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
they're paying low six figures at best and there's 10+ meetings a week
I've had this job. The 'meaningfulness' wears off. Now I look for meaning in myself and family, not my work.
At work I trade my time for money to fund the meaningful part of my life.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
The distracters aren't really effective if there's not a plausible argument for them. That's largely the point of distracters. The goal is to identify the best answer.
You are productive when you produce stuff. The question details 4 types of items and 2 crops that are produced. The crops are also produce.
They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash.
In your reply, you focused on hunting but what about "growing corn and squash"?
Busy? Yes. But exciting? In what galaxy could you say growing corn and squash is exciting? That's a resounding no, to me. That significantly downgrades B as an answer, IMO.
What this is though, is productive. (We even call it "produce" in stores)
Some of these things sound dull or dreary, but I'm just not seeing how you can call doing all of these things dull and dreary. Beautiful pottery? Fine sashes? Turquoise jewelry? The picture the author is painting does not really communicate dull and dreary to me. I can see how they might be painstaking and hard, but they're still describing fashionable and pretty things. "Dull" is very much downgraded as a choice to me. What about hunting? Really hard to think dull and dreary here as well.
What all of these things have in best common is they involve producing. Fine jewelry, container chotchkas, or hunting or growing food to eat.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
Sure, but "they continued this way until 1200 AD". That should put you in an old timey frame of reference. I don't know much about the time before 1200 AD but I bet baskets that hold water would be hella clutch.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Hokkaido, I believe. It was a long shot though, thanks anyway!
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
Me too. Tech before / during the dot com bust. Finance / investment banking, managed services, defense.
I think I may be seeing some geographic selection effects too. It could be the median candidate in London, UK is better than the median candidate in the Boston suburbs.
felis-parenthesis
1hr ago
The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
Weird I find country increasingly feels self referential and unlistenable. My dad was listening to country radio, and Cowboys and Plowboys came on, and it just made me want to gag. A whole song built on a fake distinction between fake identities of people who don't exist. It just felt so manufactured.
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