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.

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.

I’m also curious to see when one of these self-styled freedom fighters will emerge to stop one of these ICE kidnappings, in fact

The revolution will not be televised

Wake up, liberals. New Gulag Archipelago just dropped.

What other means is there for primary accumulation if you’re not finding vacant land or taking occupied property?

Are you creating new real estate from nothing?

popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less.

What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?

You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.

you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.

You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up after the “underpriced” properties, with some uncleared inventory unless demand exceeds supply.

But surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.

Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital.

They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program.

Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.

But what is the cost of housing?

Land, labor, and materials.

Where do the materials come from to build the housing?

Via natural deposits of resources.

Where does the labor come from to build the housing?

Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.

And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market?

No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay.

Again, no. That’s not how public housing is allocated or valued.

And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

Areas become desireable through their improvement. Public housing transforms vacant real estate into a desirable place to live.

On the flip side, residents do a poor job of maintaining housing when they lack the time, the expertise, the resources, and the energy to keep it up. This is not unique to public property by any stretch. Private homes also fall into disrepair when the owners lack upkeep skills or the money and time to provide proper maintenance. State and municipal governments pay enormous sums to affect “Slum Clearance” in order to evict and renovate low-income housing into property desirable for high-income investment. And federal governments subsidize the financial wing of real estate even more heavily.

We’re happy to spend absurd GDP-buckling sums to financialize real estate to the benefit of a handful of magnets. Surely you can see the virtue in paying a fraction of these sums to mobilize a professional workforce capable of maintaining property at-cost.

Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world.

It is exactly the opposite. Given the political authority and the financial resources of a major metropolitan city, providing at-cost housing and maintenance is downright trivial. But acquiring that political capital is the challenge, as you are fighting the economic propaganda of a thousand fiscal parasites who have all grown fat off privatization.

Damn. Can’t believe a media company would be driven by greed.

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Drink Verification Can To Continue

I’m sorry, did you say Netflix is going to be pirated aggressively for the few shows that aren’t complete slop?

That has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay

It has to do with what one is capable of paying, which plays into willingness.

Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.

Extortion is an extension of monopoly pricing. If you can threaten someone’s access to a necessary good/service, then you are functionally extorting them.

That’s before you get into cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices

Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.

As an alternative to renting in a hostile rental environment sure.

But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.

Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment.

If you need to threaten someone’s health or safety to extract payment, it isn’t willing.

I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity

:-/

Okay, sure.

Traditionally, a business without clients is called a hobby.

someone is willing to pay is the sum total of what a business gets income from

Except credit changes the math on that significantly. You aren’t constrained by your income, but by your risk of default (and even then… glances 2008-ward) Then you can afford to buy more by paying a higher interest rate.

the capitalist marketplace, is 100% correlated to income willingly given vs cost of obtaining that income

“Willingly” is doing a lot of lifting, given the degree to which fraud, extortion, and price gouging play a roll in the national economy.

What shocks me about much of the U.S. economy is how much is spent on marketing, promotion, advertising, and sales. 0% value derived from such activity, but frequently over half the cost of things that are purchased in the U.S. is sunk in promotion.

Promotion (and deception and intimidation) drives sales. They create the illusion of scarcity and transform luxury into necessity.

They add perceived value among the unwitting and create implicit value through absence of harm.

something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it

That’s a naive short-term approach to valuation.

Real value has to be measured in some kind of revenue generation, or - at least - cost mitigation. Otherwise what you’re describing isn’t value but expense.

the willing buyer is the key to the whole valuation equation

The willing buyer is the key to perceived value. But suckering someone doesn’t increase the utility of what you sold them.

Every registered voter can say Elon deserves to be in jail and guys like Merrick Garland will just kinda drag their heels, wave their hands, and insist there’s nothing to prosecute him on.

Meanwhile, we still have people in Guantanamo Bay from 20 years ago who have never stood trial.