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admiralteal

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admiralteal , to news in Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.

She told her class they would spend the next few days listening to a recording of the book, while each student took notes. After that, they would conduct independent research to develop their own arguments. They could agree with Coates, disagree with him or land in the middle.

...

Both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.

“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview.

You're just wrong about what kinds of works a good AP Lang class should be teaching. You're wrong about what the class is, how it works, and what it intends. You're wrong about the science of education going into this. You're wrong about the cross-disciplinary nature of the lessons. You're wrong about the purpose of this book being assigned. And in that wrongness you are advocating for a world where education does a worse job teaching kinds how to navigate and be resilient in a world full of people that are going to constantly be trying to convince them to believe certain things and act certain ways.

admiralteal , to news in Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.

A social studies teacher is not the right person to be analyzing and teaching modern persuasive writing styles. That material belongs in an English class and if you teach it in social studies you have philological fucked up.

admiralteal , to technology in Ethiopia set to become first country to ban internal combustion cars

I have no idea what the specific requirements for vehicle registration are. I doubt this article is even true, frankly.

But electrifying smaller vehicles is much, much easier than electrifying large vehicles. The biggest cost center in an EV is the battery, and smaller vehicles need proportionally way less battery compared to large vehicles. An ebike that can go 20-30mph runs off of something not substantially different from a cordless tool battery -- a pack of cheap, commodity 18650s -- and otherwise functions off of totally standard, mechanically simple parts.

admiralteal , to news in Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.

It is, though. You just don't know it -- probably because your dumbass teachers avoided non-white authors in your classes.

admiralteal , to technology in Ethiopia set to become first country to ban internal combustion cars

155k registered motor vehicles in Ethiopia for a population of about 130 million. Is it really so unimaginable to you that a country may not be car-dependent?

admiralteal , to news in Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.

You cannot hope to teach any kind of literature without teaching important context around it. You are wrong.

admiralteal , to news in ‘Make money by denying care’: new US rules aim to curb use of approval by private health insurances

With group policies, it means that the insurance companies can do their actuarial work on the entire group in aggregate without having to have considerations about prorating based on certain individuals entering or leaving the policy throughout the year.

At least ostensibly. I doubt this actually happens. It's mostly just a way to limit administrative overhead for both the insurance companies and the employers.

Don't think for a moment that employers don't like the whole open enrollment system too. Even if they CLAIM it is a PITA, it lets them only have to deal with this work for newly-qualified employees, separations, and otherwise only once a year.

Either way, it's of no benefit only harmful to the actual consumers of the insurance. But since individuals aren't the customers, that doesn't matter.

admiralteal , to news in ‘Make money by denying care’: new US rules aim to curb use of approval by private health insurances

It's the persistent lie of the free market.

Yes, in theory if health insurance were a transparent, understandable product that you could easily switch with another one as an individual based on your needs and costs, market competition would optimize that product rapidly for service and cost.

But every single thing about that theory is wrong.

  1. It's an intensely opaque process. You have no real way to know what the costs are going to be, what your needs will be, what your options will be. You can't even know what a doctor's appointment will cost under healthcare until you get the bill, sometimes a full year later (at least in my experience. Nothing about healthcare costs are understandable even to someone with an advanced medical degree. The layperson has no hope.
  2. You also cannot easily switch it with another product. Open enrollment and contracts severely limit you. There's only fixed, stressful windows where you can change it -- and even then, you're back to point 1. What is the difference between the two plans in actual practice? It's all just gambling.
  3. As you already observed, if your employer offers healthcare, you basically have no choice but to use that product because the subsidies are so intense. You are not an individual. The individual plans suck, are intensely expensive, and usually both across-the-board. The ONLY affordable option for the average person is the employer-offered product, so your choices are severely limited.

And it go this way because the most powerful agents in this system are not individuals.

With home/auto insurance, basically everything gets driven to a commodity product because all costs and risks are pretty uniform and predictable. That's why there is vanishingly little difference in the core products being offered by these kinds of insurance companies, and why the idea that switching your plan is sure to save you gobs of money is... improbable, outside of just periodic renegotiation of rates.

With health, the costs and risks are WILDLY unpredictable. The difference between an "expensive" customer and a cheap one is many, many orders of magnitude.

So naturally, risk must get hedged. The system's need for efficiency is going to try and package people together, just like any other high-risk, low-reward financial product. The need to group people is obvious, so we made it mandatory for employers to provide insurance as a weird workaround to the logical thing of government-run insurance. Now the customers are primarily employers who have TOTALLY different needs and desires from cheap, high-quality healthcare service. The free market will now do its work and optimize based on supply and demand. The efficiency gains will benefit the vendors (insurance companies) and the customers (employers). Individuals are not benefiting from market forces at all.

Free markets are great systems where they apply. They're really good for rapidly assembling efficient systems to get products to customers. But they only work where they work. The persistent lie of the free market is that EVERY problem can be solved with a free market. Nope. Only certain problems can. And where free markets don't work, that typically means you have need of government to step in instead.

admiralteal , to worldnews in Hamas gives 'initial positive confirmation' on ceasefire

Nor will Hamas release all of theirs, frankly.

admiralteal , to technology in A new internet is forming (& Meta wants to control it) [21:30]

I had some French cousins we would talk to a little bit at the time, and I remember their descriptions of the early internet were just absolutely bizarre in comparison with the minitels.

In those days, I'm sure every major region and country had vastly different experiences.

But yeah, at least my experience in the US was that AIM was huge. My entire peer group was connected through AIM. That and memorized land line phone numbers.

admiralteal , to technology in A new internet is forming (& Meta wants to control it) [21:30]

God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.

It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).

Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser -- literally any other browser -- while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. "AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don't need to use it to go to infoseek.com" or whatever.

Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they'd close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.

I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.

admiralteal , to news in 'White Lives Matter' member gets 18 years for firebombing church that planned drag events

The Proud Boys was started as an anti-masturbation support group for a bunch of self-proclaimed porn addict incels.

I don't really have a point or joke. Just wanted to type that true sentence.

admiralteal , to news in Boomers wanting to downsize face huge tax bills

Huh? Did you only read that single sentence from the entire thing I wrote? I posted explaining my take on what the problem being described in this article really is. Then how this situation doesn't just affect the older, house-rich folks, but how it goes on to hurt all of us. And moreover how the fixes for the general problems in housing policy to help everyone get into more affordable homes would also help these same people.

... and your takeaway from what I wrote is that I'm white knighting for boomers?

That's very frustrating for me.

admiralteal , to technology in Microsoft Edge is apparently usurping Chrome on people’s PCs

Dark patterns.

All the big tech firms do this shit all over the place because the regulators are sound asleep at the wheel.

admiralteal , to news in Boomers wanting to downsize face huge tax bills

Why'd you put this in reply to my comment?

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