🎵 In the LAAAAAND of the FREEEE 🎶

🎶 And the HOME. OF. THE. BRAAAAAAVE. 🎵

Aluminium is found on Earth primarily in rocks in the crust, where it is the third-most abundant element, after oxygen and silicon, rather than in the mantle, and virtually never as the free metal. It is obtained industrially by mining bauxite, a sedimentary rock rich in aluminium minerals.

But these guys are getting it from anorthosite, which is an interesting variation of industrial trends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorthosite

The primary economic value of anorthosite bodies is the titanium-bearing oxide ilmenite. However, some Proterozoic anorthosite bodies have large amounts of labradorite, which is quarried for its value as both a gemstone and a building material. Archean anorthosites, because they are aluminium-rich, have large amounts of aluminium substituting for silicon; a few of these bodies are mined as ores of aluminium

Isn’t Greenland just part of Denmark? Why would Europeans doing mineral exploration in Europe hurt America?

I mean, would Alaska’s governor opening up more of the wildlife refugee for US industrial exploitation be a “blow to Olaf Schultz”?

Or Top Gun.

I’ve yet to meet a woman who wasn’t into a good foot-rub. It’s my go-to opening move for the Netflix-and-Chill date and rarely fails to end in us at least making out. I never really got “foot-fetish” as a guy thing. It struck me more as a girl thing, with women using “rub my feet” as an excuse to initiate intimacy. And some guys just decided if a woman was showing any amount of feet, she must be coming on to him.

I mean that’s basically the idea behind any societal view which dictates that women should cover any particular part of their body, it’s not that muslim people inherently find hair sexy, it’s the societal norms which attached an intimate meaning to hair.

I think the issue isn’t the presentation of hair, but of femininity. And the more extreme interpretations of this (hardly unique to Islam - Puritanical Christians, orthodox Jews, and other more fanatical patriarchal faiths also demand women hide themselves) are about disguising any aspect of a person that might lead to a man being aroused. Eventually, you’re just shoving women into an entirely separate room, because the presumption is that men have zero self-control in any social setting.

If you cut out all of the fructose, glucose, and carbohydrates from your diet.

Problem is, these foodstuffs are cheap and easy to preserve and distribute. So a lot of what you’re suggesting boils down to “if you buy more fresh produce” which ultimately means “if you spend more money on groceries that spoil faster”.

Even that doesn’t address the relative health hazards of chronic high consumption of red meat when compared to white meat. But, again, we’re talking about an enormously subsidized beef industry even compared to fish and chicken (where it seems we’re intent on raising prices through ecological destruction/abysmal hygiene). The game still boils down to having this avalanche of surplus ground beef that’s practically being given away next to healthier options that are far more expensive.

A few nights ago, I watched a classic film called “The Battle for Algiers”. The movie explored the French occupation of Algeria during the independence movement of the late 50s/early 60s.

And let me tell you, “civilized” France was doing some curiously unciviled shit by the end.

They’re protected by court precedent citing the 1st amendment. Any five judges can change that, assuming they don’t simply wave through a decision from the circuit courts that amount to the same.

A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.

The “old people complaining about Shakespeare” was the thin end of the wedge intended to defund and dismantle public education. But the leverage comes from large groups of people who are sold the notion that children are just born dumb or smart and education has no material benefit.

A lot of this isn’t about teaching styles. It’s about public funding of education and the neo-confederate dream of a return to ethnic segregation.

There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings?

A lot of these studies come out of public sector federal and state education departments that have been targeted by anti-public education lobbying groups. So what used to be a wealth of public research into the benefits of education has dried up significantly over the last generation.

What we get instead is a profit-motivated push for standardized testing, lionized by firms that directly benefit from public sector purchasing of test prep and testing services. And these tend to come via private think-tanks with ties back to firms invested in bulk privatization of education. So good luck in your research, but be careful when you see something from CATO or The Gates Foundation, particularly in light of the fact that more reliable and objective data has been deliberately purged from public records.

Just look at the case against Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine from a few decades ago.

That was under a very different composition of judges.

This isn’t the first time they’ve tried this shit. They lost miserably last time.

The Larry Flynt case was notable because it was a significant change in the federal standard. Historically, the puritan anti-sex sentiment has been actively enforced within US law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law#Legal_issues_and_definitions

The sale and distribution of obscene materials had been prohibited in most American states since the early 19th century, and by federal law since 1873. Adoption of obscenity laws in the United States at the federal level in 1873 was largely due to the efforts of Anthony Comstock, who created and led the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock’s intense efforts led to the passage of an anti-obscenity statute known as the Comstock Act which made it a crime to distribute “obscene” material through the post.

Anti-obscenity laws endured for nearly a century prior to Miller. And the current government seems to be fixated on a return to that Old Thyme Religion.

Sort of a perversion of Public Interest Law.

Conservative political interests have become well-versed in the strategy of promoting and funding cases that can provoke rulings to achieve legislative consequences at the court level. Citizens United, Janus v. AFSCME, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization being classic recent examples.

Very possible we’ll see a “Porn is de facto illegal” court case inside the next four years.

Independent School District.

Although, given how my Houston ISD is being run after being hijacked by the state government…

Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?

The only serious method of evaluating critical thinking and creativity is through peer evaluation. But that’s a subjective scale thick with implicit bias, not a clean and logical discrete answer. It’s also not something you can really see in the moment, because true creativity and critical thinking will inevitably produce heterodox views and beliefs.

Only by individuals challenging and outperforming the status quo to you see the fruits of a critical and creative labor force. In the moment, these folks just look like they’re outliers who haven’t absorbed the received orthodoxy. And a lot of them are. You’ll get your share of Elizabeth Holmes-es and Sam Altmans alongside your Vincent Van Goghs and Nikolai Teslas.

I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers.

I agree that we’re flush with think-pieces. Incidentally, the NYT Op-Ed section has doubled in size over the last few years.

But that’s sort of the rub. You can’t get a well-defined answer to the question “Is Our Children Creative-ing?” because we only properly know it by the fruits of the system. Comically easy to walk into a school with a creative writing course and scream about how this or that student is doing creativity wrong. Comically easy to claim a school is Marxist or Fascist or too Pro/Anti-Religion or too banal and mainstream by singling out a few anecdotes in order to curtail the whole system.

The fundamental argument is that this kind of liberal arts education is wasteful. The output isn’t steady and measureable. The quality of the work isn’t easily defined as above or below the median. It doesn’t yield real consistent tangible economic value. So we need to abolish it in order to become more efficient.

And that’s what we’re creating. A society that is laser-focused on making economic numbers go up, without stopping to ask whether a larger GDP actually benefits anyone living in the country where all this fiscal labor is performed.

American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy.

Well, historically that’s true.

But the modern American education system is about Stack Ranking to create the illusion of meritocracy. So the functional purpose of the system is to score better than the rest of your classmates. Since the actual lesson plan doesn’t matter and only the honors you get from completing the course are perceived to have value, you either want to cheat the hell out of every course to beat the herd. Or you want to find a degree plan where you can appear to be the Best Kid In Class, either through grade inflation or by participating in a class full of dropouts/fake students.

It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.

Rote memorization is easy to evaluate, because the answers are discrete and can be fed into a binary grading engine.

It’s also easy to cheat, because you don’t need to know how to solve the problems, just how to source the correct pattern of answers.

Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?

In theory, they need to study in order to learn the skills necessary to be gainfully employed. But in practice, the promise of the future is “automate everything”, so might as well learn how to maximize the outputs of the Big Grifting Machine while you’re still young.

Why waste time mastering comprehensive writing when there won’t be any employers left to read what you wrote? Why waste time developing technical skills when everything gets outsourced to the lowest bidding firm in the South Pacific? Why waste time developing a talent for artistry, music, or cinema when we’ve decided the future of performative arts is whatever bot-farm best self-promotes AI slop to the top of the most trending Spotify playlist?

When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I’m not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.

Why do they care if the code is full of bugs? They’ll be changing jobs in another two years anyway, because that’s the only way to get a raise. They aren’t invested in the success of their current firm, much less the profitablility of the clients they work for (who are, themselves, likely going to be outsourcing this shit to India in another few years). And all this work is just about maximizing the bottom line for private equity anyway, so why does anyone care if the project succeeds? It’s not like my quality of life hinges on my ability to do useful productive work.

And if quality of life declines? Just find someone to blame. Migrants. The Wrong Politicians. China. Lizard People. Fuck, I’ll just ask ChatGPT why my life sucks and believe everything it tells me, because… why not? Its not like everyone else isn’t lying.

The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.

Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.

yall sold the usa for 100 dollars?

Consider that Trump had something like a 47% approval rating on the day of the election.

Also, yes. People are broke af, hate their neighborhood, hate their country, and hate everyone who has governed it since JFK. If someone offered you $100 for a pile of shit, you’d take the deal, too.

The joke of it all is that they believed a career con-artist would pay out, not that they gleefully pawned the broke down jalopy of a nation-state at the first opportunity.

Do not think for a second that they won’t try to do it again.