This is the socialism they tried to warn us about.

There’s a very “We Report You Decide” attitude among liberal teachers. And while I don’t object to it on it’s face, I gotta say it feels more and more like bringing a pea shooter to a machine gun fight.

I wouldn’t expect anyone - child or adult - to intuit morality. At some point you just have to hang the rainbow flag and declare your classroom a safe space for transgender kids

Satan isn’t a pedo.

I wouldn’t hang my hat on this. Satanists have as much a problem with pedophilia as every other branch of the Christian faith.

And now because of the Streisand Effect

The point isn’t actually to “protect the child from knowing”. The point is to censor school faculty from speaking positively of LGBTQ+ people and to exclusively degrade and slander the community from reactionary media organs.

The kid will absolutely know about LGBTQ+ people, because their minister will give fire and brimstone speeches about how the community is full of sinful and debauched degenerates. The kid will be raised to hate and fear LGBTQ+ people because they will only be shown to him in the most negative light.

This lawsuit guarantees any public employee who contradicts this framing can be legally fired, that they can suffer civil and criminal liabilities that bankrupt them, and that the kid can be used as a weapon to justify this persecution.

It’s Heads-I-Win and Tails-You-Lose in the Trump-stacked court system.

You’re looking at the judiciary as some kind of impartial machine, but you need to see it as a Vegas Casino, where you can maybe win a hand or two here or there but the game is stacked against you by design.

There is no world in which a conservative court bans Christmas Trees or Crosses or any other Christian iconography, because these courts are run by evangelical Christians for the benefit of evangelical Christians. You might as well ask a Chinese court to remove images of Mao from the classroom or an Iranian court to outlaw the Koran.

To think, if we’d had this kind of majority 20 years ago, we could have removed the entire study of evolution from high school criteria.

Affordability

“My opponent wants to send 10,000 armed men to the border to begin seizing women and children, summarily executing any vaguely hispanic looking men, and looting them for their most valuable belongings before casting the survivors out into the desert to starve. And I say we need to consider whether all the money for this program could be better spent on a means-tested plan to subsidies charter schools in low income minority neighborhoods.”

“Democrats in the House and Senate [are] focusing on lowering your costs, dealing with affordability. Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are focused on spending treasure and, God forbid, lives on military adventurism overseas,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters this week, just before the chamber voted to advance a resolution halting further attacks on Venezuela without congressional permission.

Fully unironically. Jesus fuck.

Schumer doubled down at his recent press conference, promising that “Democrats are going to make healthcare and other high costs, the high cost of living, the No 1 issue for all of 2026”.

Juan Guaido in shambles.

Police engaged in a highly kinetic confrontation between the barrel of their service revolver and the aggressively kneeling and loudly pleading agitated individuals. Officers grew alarmed at the loud pleading sounds and fired eight to forty seven warning shots in the vicinity of the noise. Following a tactical survey of the area, they discovered a number of dead bodies which may have been involved in a firearms-based confrontation. Officers reported the situation to their immediate superiors and continued to patrol the area in search of enemy combatants and distressed civilians in order to provide emergency services.

🤪 What a nutter? Who does he think he is? A dictator? Haha. Lolz. What a maroon.

You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.

Venezuela didn’t join China though.

They dramatically increased business with China to evade our sanctions. We responded by tightening controls over the Panama Canal and encircling the Venezuelan coastline to halt sea trade.

Short of reuniting the Chinas, there can be no mainland-china-friendly government in Taiwan

That’s simply not true. The current government in Beijing is happy with any thawing of tension and increase in trade/travel between Taiwan and the mainland, particularly with an eye towards increased private mainland investment in the island and high tech exports to mainland industries.

Improving the flow of trade between the island and the coast means predicating more of Taiwan’s economy on friendly relations with mainland industry. And that creates the kind of political gravity Beijing bureaucrats used to rope in Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. Incidentally, its a salty subject for North Koreans, as Kim’s Juche philosophy staunchly rejects critical utilities and resources coming from outside the sovereign territory.

But the old line “China thinks in centuries” holds here. All Xi is working towards is reconciliation. The hand wringing about “Imminent Chinese Invasion!” is US bluster intended to justify severing civilian trade and travel with the island preemptively. Americans need Taiwanese residents to be terrified of Chinese incursion in order to alienate the island from Chinese business and culture. Because that’s the real long term play.

We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.

I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.

I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.

Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)

I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.

Schools generally buy anything microsoft offers with the little budget they have.

Far more Pearson than Microsoft. The “teach to the test” regime is all about selling schools test prep material that effectively tells you the answers to the next round of Pearson-written standardized exams. I’m sure Pearson is eagerly integrating with Microsoft AI tools, so they can cut their own internal staffing and roll out more profitable digital variations of their material.

But schools pay top dollar for these resources because state administrators use exam scores as a benchmark for school funding. So the $10M you pay for test prep material may determine the next $50M in funding your school receives, relative to the poorer districts that couldn’t afford to buy answers in advance.

Why did any school higher ups pay to implement these?

Tons of kickbacks to high ranking administrators, double-dealing with teachers being contracted or poached by Pearson for test-writing gigs, state administrators moving between jobs in the school board/legislature and positions within Pearson, people with stock and other debt instruments that profit when Pearson does well…

FFS, the Houston ISD takeover by the State of Texas ended with a Colorado private school management guy sending tens of millions of dollars from the Houston public schools to pay consulting fees to Colorado private school agencies. That’s as corrupt as it comes.

I mean, the bitter truth of all this is the downsizing and resource ratcheting of public schools creating an enormous labor crisis prior to the introduction of AI. Teachers were swamped with prep work for classes, they were expected to juggle multiple subjects of expertise at once, they were simultaneously educator and disciplinarian for class sizes that kept mushrooming with budget cuts. Students are subject to increasingly draconian punishments that keep them out of class longer, resulting in poorer outcomes in schools with harsher discipline. And schools use influxes of young new teachers to keep wages low, at the expense of experience.

These tools take the pressure off people who have been in a cooker since the Bush 43 administration and the original NCLB school privatization campaign. AI in schools as a tool to bulk process busy work is a symptom of a deeper problem. Kids and teachers coordinating cheating campaigns to meet arbitrary creeping metrics set by conservative bureaucrats are symptoms of a deeper problem. The education system as we know it is shifting towards a much more rigid and ideologically doctrinaire institution, and the endless testing + AI schooling are tools utilized by the state to accomplish the transformation.

Simply saying “No AI in Schools” does nothing to address the massive workload foisted on faculty. It does nothing to address how Teach-The-Test has taken over the educational philosophy of public schooling. And it does nothing to shrink class sizes, to maintain professional teachers for the length of their careers (rather than firing older teachers to keep salaries low), or to maximize student attendance rates - the three most empirically proven techniques to maximizing educational quality.

AI is a crutch for a broken system. Kicking the crutch out doesn’t fix the system.

If Taiwan itself elects a China-friendly government, it’s game over.

Venezuela elected a China-friendly government and we responded by kidnapping the President.

If China invades Taiwan, I could very much see the US helping Taiwan though.

The US will describe any propaganda campaign or business arbitrage as an “invasion” and respond with lethal force. In US terms, any influence China has over the island’s public is a de facto invasion, because it threatens the US sphere of influence.

Maturity comes from life experience and plenty of people mature very quickly in periods of adversity, while their peers linger in childhood or adolescence because there’s no stressors propelling them onward.

I should note that “maturity” isn’t some kind of universal good, either. A person regularly subjected to physical violence will learn coping mechanisms to avoid or endure that abuse. They’ll come out with these reflexes and responses that other adults can read as “mature”. But I wouldn’t say they’re better for it.

Similarly, people who endure poverty have to learn mature habits as a method of survival far sooner than their wealthier peers - how to provide food and shelter for yourself, how to navigate social bureaucracies, how to operate motor vehicles safely. But the techniques they adopt - lying, stealing, driving without any formal training - aren’t condusive to a safe neighborhood or a functional social network.

Invading Mexico or Columbia ranks higher.

The US has been conducting military actions in both countries for nearly a century. How many times do you have to bomb a place before you’re officially counted as “at war” with them?

Invading China probably takes top spot though.

We really really really don’t want China to regain control of Taiwan. I think it is very possible we get into a shooting war if a Chinese friendly government ever wins an election on the island.

Falklands on notice