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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. My friends call it a “deranged screed”, several batches of restraining orders call it an “unhinged manifesto,” but I call it my magnum opus: last summer I may have sent in a small 250 page excerpt from an informational document highlighting some of the more compelling reasons for some badly needed uniform updates (the usual suspects — capes, shoes with glitter spurs, and bigger Nike logos). I hope this thread doesn’t doxx me, but I guess greater visibility for my ideas would be welcomed.
  2. Do the reports discuss the likelihood the patients are lizard people?
  3. If the toddler model is the approach that cops should take, he should have guided her in singing a song about how angry she was, let her say bye-bye to everyone and everything in the bank, and then told her how proud he was of her for leaving without a tantrum.
  4. When I read the title, I figured it would be a righteous rant about how my out-of-state tax dollars will be going to save Texas from their irresponsible power management policies. Texans saving money for years and then coming hat in hand when the bill is due. I was ready to provide whole-hearted support of the righteous indignation. But alas, it was just a barely sensible partisan rant. We live in a society. Social contract out front should have told you.
  5. Jennifer with a G is like Robert with a W.
  6. I thought this one already came up during one of the caravans.
  7. My wife and I joined team Pfizer this morning. I’m a little disappointed that my 40 time hasn’t gotten any faster, but at least there haven’t been any negative side effects yet. It feels really good to see a path out of this for my family.
  8. Mole

    “Cuck”

    As I’m sure my friends are tired of hearing me say this, but it’s a fundamental truth, if you think a slightly higher marginal tax rate is better, or if you think the universal healthcare would be a more efficient allocation of our resources, or if you’re against the violent overthrow of the government, then you are either actively working to traffic children or you like to watch other men have their way with your wife. There’s no other possible explanation.
  9. Mr. Wizard’s longcat was more redemptive and at the time seemed sadly more believable.
  10. Tomorrow morning I’m going to start tracking the direction the sun rises from to see if I can establish a pattern in a few years.
  11. She’s kind of a big deal. She rightly called Trumpism idolatry recently. The evangelical Trumpers that I know already somewhat rejected her over it and found themselves make defenses of Christian nationalism in the process. The SBC seems to be one step forward, two steps back. In the past several years they’ve made a few real positive steps in redeeming their explicitly racist founding but then they keep stepping in it over race and other issues. For example, without really consulting the faculty, the seminary presidents jointly rejected critical race theory as any kind of useful framework.
  12. Like you, I am a professor of something other than English. And also like you, I’ve never had a bribe attempt. Still, there’s something amiss here. I’m struggling to articulate precisely what the issue is, but the government paying students for grades changes the nature of the relationship between teacher, parent, and student in some ways that seem troubling to me. It doesn’t have to simply be the grift aspect. The payoff might be worth this change in dynamic, but I don’t think it’s wise to pretend that things wouldn’t be different. I suspect that there would be significant pushback from teachers due to these changes. It could exacerbate the already adversarial relationship that seems to exist between some parents and teachers. Good grades and recommendations leading to better paying jobs or even scholarships is abstracted enough from the monetary payoff to be different than the government making it rain for high scoring essays by second graders. If they were the same, no one would suggest paying students for good grades, since they would already be motivated by the benefits of a good education. I think it’s an interesting idea, but there are problems.
  13. Put another way, my parents paid me for good grades and it was a motivating factor. It also served to perpetuate a supportive relationship between parent and teacher. My parents were supporting the work of my teachers. Outside money turns this relationship on its head. Teachers already complain about the toxic, unsupportive relationship with many parents and this looks like it could make things worse. There might be ways to pull it off, but there are ways it could really make things worse as well.
  14. I tend to like the general idea of monetary and other incentives, but tying it to grades invites some problems. If the money is enough to be an incentive, it’s probably enough to draw and all sorts of issues: grift, an even less supportive relationship between parents and teachers, etc. It introduces a whole new set of weird pressures on the teachers which doesn’t seem healthy. There might be ways to pull it off, but there are some problems. Simply tying it to attendance eliminates most of these problems although it might lessen the positive learning impact.
  15. Maybe Deion could reopen his Prime Academy to start pulling in that a sweet B+ government cash.
  16. On some level, yes: let me steal this case of Natty light and I’ll split it with you. But grading little Johnny’s presentation on Sam Houston is nebulous in a way that a missing case of watered down beer isn’t. Of course it depends on how the payments would be made and the amount of money involved as to whether or not it would be worth it.
  17. Also, things that keep kids engaged need to be seen as essential to their education just like math and reading. That means sports, art, drama, music, scouts, and other things that don’t show up on standardized test questions need broad support especially in the most underperforming areas. Chasing the almighty test score might not be the best way to develop an educated populace.
  18. I know I brought up the fraud issue, but the general concept is intriguing to me. Some mix of parental tax credits for child school attendance, small but tangible rewards for the kids, some sort of investment towards post high school educational funding, and high school/industry vocational partnerships seems like something with potential. If a kid doesn’t see what there is to gain from school, why should they care? Incentive works. My kid isn’t school age yet, but we’ve offered toys for accomplishing various educational tasks that might take some weeks to learn and it’s clearly motivating. I’ve long thought that the plan of paying young women to take birth control would also have a clear benefit on many fronts, but I’m guessing that would never fly in our current environment.
  19. Paying kids for grades: an interesting idea that seems also ripe for fraud. Hey teacher, give me an A and I'll cut you in on some of this action.
  20. Never is probably too strong of a word and I guess there would be cases where there's some sort of clock they could run out, but if all they could do is slow things down and make a spectacle of themselves, it seems like it wouldn't be the all powerful and painless thing it is now. Even if they lined up 50 Senators up in a row, eventually that has to end as well, right? These old Senators can only keep this up for so long. I've seen Hand on a Hardbody; there are limits to the human body. I certainly don't fully understand all of the ins and outs of Senate rules, so there could obviously be something that I'm missing.
  21. Making them talk seems like the easy answer. Most people probably assume that’s still how it’s done anyway; it would make for lots of look-at-me theatrics which politicians love; and it would never kill good legislation just slow things down while still allowing the minority party a chance to make their case.
  22. I’m not sure I want to drill down here, but this sounds like a euphemism.
  23. I’m going to push back some on this. It’s overly simplistic to boil all of this down to economics, although that’s obviously a big part of it. Even if you set aside the question of why economic issues seem to impact the Black community more (which pretty easily traces back to a long and storied history of racism), there are access issues that probably can’t be fully explained by economics. There are well-founded trust issues between the Black community and government agents offering medical advice. There are all of the issues that have been brought up in this thread, which are partially economic (which again, is largely a race issue once removed) but also something more. And there’s the persistent unwillingness by “us” to do much about it or even acknowledge the obvious. I think it might be revealing to do an informal study on the history of the popular portrayal of poor people (white? black? young? old?) and how much we collectively cared. I have my suspicions that as the poor became increasingly portrayed as Black our culture became less interested in caring about or dealing productively with the problem, but it’s just a hunch right now.
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