He / They

  • 20 Posts
  • 1.23K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I agree with the conclusion of the article:

    “School’s the same for 120 years, where kids go nine to three, have long holidays, sit at desks and have to regurgitate what the adults tell them to learn, basically all over the world. We’re blaming kids for falling academic standards, we’re blaming the rise in mental ill health, we’re blaming the rise of cyberbullying. Oh, well, it all must be the fault of the mobile phone,” Marilyn Campbell told Al Jazeera.

    “I mean, what a simplistic view of how we are educating our children in a different world and taking away that main tool that we’re all using in society and saying, ‘No, the kids can’t have it now’.”

    A balanced approach, involving regulated use and clear guidelines, may be the most effective way to harness the benefits of smartphones while minimising their drawbacks, experts say.

    The general recommendation of Campbell and Edwards, who carried out the scoping review in Australia, was to leave it to individual schools to determine smartphone use and to focus on helping children to use smartphones positively.




  • Kids should be required to pay attention when they are a student.

    I agree with this provided we have supplied them with a reasonable learning environment and expectations. Employees should be required to pay attention when at work, sure, but if we are put in a horrible work environment we would also refuse to work, or if it’s really bad, quit. Students don’t have the latter option, (nor the monetary incentive to ‘tough it out’) so the former is, by necessity, what they go to.

    I think people have got this backwards: Lack of attention doesn’t disrupt the learning environment. Lack of a proper learning environment disrupts attention.

    I do believe the teachers and administration need the ability to contain disruptions in class.

    Looking at your phone doesn’t stop anyone else from learning; that’s a disruption to the class. You can’t define “class disruption” as “not learning” (you can stare blankly at a textbook quietly and not learn anything). Class disruptions are behaviors that prevent or impede other students from learning, which looking quietly at a cell phone doesn’t do.

    I am reminded of the axiom of, “if one employee (student) is failing (being disruptive), you have a Personnel problem. If many employees are failing, you have a Management problem”. There will always be problem students, but they’re not really who we’re talking about. We’re talking about a widespread disconnect from a large number of students, because they are not being provided with a learning environment that engages them.

    I work at a large company, and WFH during lockdown completely changed the employee attitude towards being trapped in a box of our employers’ choosing. My entire team is now remote, and maybe 10% of people go into the office once a week, at most, and probably half or more of us would quit outright if you tried to force us into RTO.

    Students also experienced this, but they are all being given RTO orders, and (to reiterate once again), cannot quit, which really reinforces that it’s entirely possible for them to not be in the school building each day, but are being forced to for someone else’s benefit (and kids aren’t dumb, the argument that reopening schools was for the benefit of getting parents back to work was very publicly stated, and kids saw that). This does not make for a healthy mental situation that is conducive to (school)work/learning.

    Do I think that means schools must run like prisons? Hell no.

    But they share fundamental similarities. That’s just the reality. What building forces adults to be trapped there, with no choice about whether to leave or not? Prisons. There’s really no way around this parallel. The question is then, “how do we make what is in effect a prison, feel less prison-like?”, and that has to be by making it an enjoyable environment. But no schools aside from the super-wealthy are even able to do this, and most aren’t even trying at the carrot. Instead, they’re switching to the stick, and that don’t work.




  • Gamefaqs and Gaia, you’re taking me back. :)

    One thing that leans me towards technocrit’s more absolutist stance on schools is how different they are now compared to when I was in high school (2003-2007):

    Schools have become much more prison-like since then. My partner is a high school teacher, and all the stuff I remember being important parts of socializing like recess, gym, free periods, clubs, band, theater, etc, have been absolutely slashed.

    There are schools now that are trying to enforce “no talking in the hallway” rules in place.

    My partner is on teacher conversation boards where other teachers are lamenting that kids talk to each other too much, but they’re locked inside with each other for 8 hours against their will! People are treating kids like school is their job, but it’s completely uncompensated from the kids’ view.

    Is school an important tool for social mobility? Yeah, absolutely, and I don’t think either I or technocrit would advocate abolishing schools, but they need to be heavily reformed in terms of what they actually offer the students before I’m comfortable discussing the next thing that schools want to strip away from them.



  • Their reasoning for forking from the original Bosca Ceoil

    It’s also using an outdated technology stack which makes it hard to impossible to run it on modern systems, namely macOS and web.

    Ah yes, I forgot that Windows and Linux are “legacy” systems. And “web” isn’t an operating system, it’s just someone else’s Linux box.

    We achieve this by reimplementing the entire application with a more modern set of tools, as a Godot engine project.

    Okay, that’s pretty great. Always glad to see Godot getting used, especially in a cool new way.




  • but which democrat candidate has a better chance?

    Based on recent polling, potentially most of them could surpass him with even a little bit of national exposure. No clue if it’s too late, or not, but better to try than just concede the election to Trump.

    I think if there was a big frontrunner they would do this.

    The DNC was pressuring other potential Democrat candidates not to run during the Primary (including the most prominent names now like Newsom, Whitmer, and Buttigieg) from the get-go, so I guarantee they’re not about to do a 180. The DNC would rather lose to Trump than run a candidate they did not ordain. Remember in 2008 when they did literally everything they could to stop Obama winning against Clinton until they had no other choice? Or 2016, which was a whole mess of undemocratic bullshit (that article is wild, and it was written by Donna Brazile, the Chairperson of the DNC during the 2016 election).

    But also even if they don’t replace Biden that doesn’t somehow make Trump a better choice… Spending so much time labouring this point

    No one is talking about voting for Trump, what we’re saying is that we don’t think Biden is going to win against Trump. That’s the reason this is worth spending so much time belaboring; to me, Biden is delivering us into Trump’s hands.

    If you believe Biden might win, then it’s ‘Chance of Winning with Biden’ versus ‘Chance of Winning with [Replacement]’, and who really knows what their chances might be?

    If you don’t believe Biden might win, it’s ‘Assured Loss with Biden’ versus ‘Chance of Winning with [Replacement]’, so obviously that would be the route to go.



  • Polling is incredibly unreliable. That is people that pick up the phone and talk to pollsters. Do you know anyone under 60 who does that? Additionally, a lot of those calls are on landlines. How many people do you know who have landlines? How many of those are under 60? The polls are heavily skewed towards boomers.

    All these incorrect assumptions of yours could have been answered simply by actually reading the poll report before making claims about it:

    On June 28, 2024, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,011 U.S. likely voters nationally using web panel respondents.

    https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2024/6/dfp_post_first_presidential_debate.pdf

    Literally entirely online.

    Polling has long since shifted away from relying on landline cold-calls. And I agree that now is certainly sub-optimal for a change; that should have happened during the Primary (you know, where candidates present themselves to voters to find out who voters want), rather than the DNC pressuring other democrats out of running. But better late than never.

    In the end, you and I are probably never going to see eye-to-eye, because of one fundamental difference of beliefs; you believe Biden might win. I don’t.

    Since it seems clear that Biden isn’t going to step aside, I really hope you’re right and I’m wrong, but I’m not banking on it.