Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My word choices have given you the impression of a scheming Machiavellian teacher who reenacts the Spanish Inquisition on the boy until his classmates pelt him to death with rotten eggs. That’s on me, it’s not what I meant. I think I’ve added enough clarification in this thread at this point. So I won’t go into it again.

    The opinion of one teacher, one that due to the question they asked initially and the forum they asked it in, and a few down votes are, I feel, not enough to call my argument dumb. Never mind the more personal attack that followed. Tackle the ball, not the player. If you want me to change my mind, that is.

    There is a whole field of study for this, pedagogy. I am sure the first chapter of the book isn’t “kids are ruthless. The end.” I remain unconvinced that my approach, where my suggestion was preconditioned on many things to have happened first, is the worst one until I hear something that isn’t that or teetering on the edge of name calling.


  • It’s an enumeration of if-phrases. “If the parents don’t support the teacher” is just the first condition of many. And some things you may have to infer, like if the teacher had to talk to the parents and got cold shouldered, I think you can presume the teacher has already talked to the student too. I’m not gonna go as far as saying my post was immaculately written and presented. I would go as far as saying the options presented were at the bottom of the list. No support from the parents, maybe not even school leadership, cannot use bitter taste spray for insurance reasons, etc.

    If a teacher telling a kid to get their feet off the table, to stop shooting spit wads at the row in front of them, to stop rocking back their chair because they might tip over and fall - if all these situations are okay for a teacher to say out loud in front of the class: “Kevin, stop it!” - and I think they are - then telling the kid not to chew on communally shared erasers is no different. Claiming this will immediately lead to bullying or just the threat that it might do is to an extent quixotic to me. If teachers will not assert their authority ever for fear of what the chaos kids will do, they might as well pack it in then.

    Your office comparisons are insignificant here. Elementary school is a different sport entirely. There is a difference between coworkers sharing an office hierarchy and the power, responsibility, and maturity differential students/teacher, never mind the fact that offices shouldn’t employ 9yos.

    OP has weighed in against the suggestion anyway. I’ll defer to them because they know more about this case than you or I.


  • You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.


  • It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

    And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

    And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.



  • In my mind, it was never a hype. It was something they wanted hyped but - and of course I can only speak for myself - I never was sitting on the edge of my seat. It’s the technology version of new wonder drug could cure cancer. And then you read the story and reality dwarfs the vision quite quickly. I thought blockchain was a much bigger deal hype-wise. And that had all the oxygen drawn out by so-called AI.

    Quantum computing is a threat because if it became mainstream usable today it could render the entire password based login system hackable in a flash, probably breaking the internet. There are two things to consider though. It isn’t usable today. And the big companies that do a lot of the research have a vested interest in not breaking the internet. So we see passkeys today and other forms of authentication will follow before QC could become a reality - if in our lifetimes or if ever - who knows.



  • I want to highlight again that this suggestion was preceded by a lengthy checklist.

    I think you and I have a different idea of what bullying is. I remember kids picking their nose in class and eating it in elementary school. I don’t think it took an intervention from the teacher to get that to stop. Just some kids going “ewww, that’s disgusting” got the message across. This is how society corrects behavior. I wasn’t suggesting a teacher goes before class, does a Nelson Ha-Ha, “look at that loser, go beat him later and take his lunch money.” Just something like “Kevin, the other kids need to use this eraser as well and they don’t like it full of spit. Please don’t chew on it. Thanks.” It signals to the kids this is not okay and I don’t think they will go full Lord of the Flies on him - keeping in mind the preconditions I had outlined above.




  • Theoretically, probably not a great experience for the people some 300mi away or closer but I don’t think it would be an extinction level event. Speed is how most of the energy gets transferred. Lower speed, smaller boom.

    I think it has to stay theoretical though. You would have to turn gravity off though or make the asteroid such a weird shape that air resistance slows it down to that speed before it hits. And I think it would have to be sail-like at that point hitting at the right angle, making its impact much less threatening and making it way more likely it would’ve burned away in our atmosphere anyway. Before it hits earth there will be gravity pulling on it, most effectively from the sun and then earth. So even if cosmic forces got it to reverse beep beep beep speed before it enters earth’s gravity well, which I would call unlikely with an asterisk, then it would speed up 9.8 m/s or 22 mi/h every second it falls from the heavens. Thus making the impact more impactful than reversing speed. The asterisk being that there is a much bigger other new body in space that exerts enough gravity on the asteroid to slow it down. Which means it’s close enough to mess earth up in other ways (tidal waves, megaquakes, etc.) even if it does not also hit us, which I would assume it does though if it got this close already. So then we’re back in extinction territory whether Corsica hits us or not.




  • With the blatant disregard for the rule of law this administration has already shown, it may not matter what number you fall under. A lot of it, very sadly, seems to be dependent on what you look like.

    If you’re 1 through 3, why are you picking a fight with a Karen? Get out before it escalates. And if it does, keep your head down and hope for the best. Or move cities, especially if you’re #1. 4’s and 5’s may want to have proof of citizenship accessible. Keep a picture of your birth/naturalization certificate and/or passport on your phone, preferably behind a password like in a password vault app - don’t just keep it in your camera roll, it needs encrypting.

    It’s also worthwhile keeping in mind that some Karens’ bark is worse than their bite. They may have gotten off on the threat enough to not go thru with it.