• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle


  • Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn’t going to help you learn what mitochondria are.

    That sounds like it’s an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they’re not judging the kids on what they know or don’t, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they’re going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn’t need to do it, I don’t think it’s stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.

    Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren’t, though.










  • Part of the reason there’s less pressure to change it than you might imagine is that we now have a hundred years of cultural inertia working on, yes, the customers and restaurants, but also on the waitstaff labor pool. At this point, the Americans who seek work as waiters are generally the ones who feel they work with the system and even turn it to their advantage. It’s far from all, of course, but the “best” servers at most restaurants probably feel like they’re going to make more working the customers than negotiating with their bosses.

    So, you’ve got restaurants keeping their list-prices low and a built-in workforce motivator, customers who expect friendly service and accept that they’re culturally responsible for the staff’s pay, and servers who stay at the job because they feel like they’ll make more than the restaurant would be willing to pay as a “fair” wage (and they’re probably right). Now, it’s full-on bizarre that we have taken an entry level service job and made it an exercise in theatrical entrepreneurship, and it says some unsettling things about the underlying social order in the US, but I’m not sure that at the nuts-and-bolts level, it’s as broken as the people like to imagine.


  • I was on Squabbles for a bit when the API changes were looming. It was fine, I ran into nice folks, but more than the performance or the community, I was concerned that a single centralized site, run by one dude, who seemed determined to set it up to quickly monetize, was not going to be sustainable.

    I admit that federation was not why I came to Kbin, but if federated sites are where open-internet folks are sharing links and pics and discussing them, then that’s where I was headed. I suppose the good thing is that anyone who is deeply invested in federation working exactly how it was originally envisioned can continue to pursue that goal with their own instances, up to the point where they consider defederation with the (relative) normies.



  • I think that’s more what the devs had in mind when they decided to make Lemmy federated. Each instance would be a little more distinct in the users it would attract (ideology, hobby, etc.), and federation would be more about exploring the local neighborhoods; maybe instances would even limit or ban user-created communities.

    In reality, most instances seem to be attracting similar users and making mini-reddits that can talk to each other. It’s ended up more about simple load balancing and having backup communities accessible should you get cut off from your preferred one. You can still get out and explore the nearby neighborhoods, but they have the same Starbucks and MicroCenter that yours does. This still is useful in its own way, but it comes with different set of challenges, particularly for the front-end UI’s.




  • I’m saying that the church claims to be the one true church with unique access to the entirety of the Gospel. I am further saying that Baptism for the Dead is described as something that the deceased person can choose to accept or reject.

    I am then saying that the “choice” to accept truths presented to you after you have died and find you now exist on a supernatural plane in which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was “correct” is no meaningful choice whatsoever. Presenting it as such is to obfuscate the fact that the Church will continue to heed its own counsel as to what is “a respectful, reverent process that is motivated purely by love,” and that the non-believers need to STFU so the Mormons can get on with the extremely important business of saving souls, but only those whose names were written down somewhere, because apparently the Lord is a stickler for paperwork.


  • “Dear Angel of the Lord, I am afraid that having died and been sent to spirit prison to be ministered to by the souls of righteous Nephites, I am still not convinced. I am sure that Catholic heaven is just on the other side of those pearly gates, and I formally request a transfer.”

    Do you not understand how patently absurd this is for a faith that makes claims of exclusive truth? It’s PR nonsense so that most outside people will shake their heads and back off, and members won’t feel like they’re doing something disrespectful and disturbing.