For less than the individual price of some missiles, you could vaccinate the entire military. Vaccines are cheap. You could vaccinate thousands of soldiers for what it will cost to treat one who gets really sick and ends up hospitalized.
This is absolutely not a cost-saving measure, even if you wholly disregard the costs of care after the fact.
This was prior to his reelection, so who would have taken the reins? Vance? Desantis? They wouldn’t have turned out the voters like Trump did, even if Fox and OAN and the rest of the propaganda machine worked overtime to harp on how dangerous the left is for assassinating their guy or whatever. Trump has a uniquely cultish charisma that Vance and any other likely replacement candidate simply didn’t.
TIL Canada is going to conquer the world
I am ignorant. I’ve never understood what Esperanto offers that another language doesn’t. It seems like Spanish with extra steps and fewer speakers. What’s the actual benefit?
I was homeschooled and have severe social anxiety and no social skills, whereas two of my siblings having exceptional social/people skills. It’s not black and white, and the bad outcomes aren’t inevitable, but I myself would never encourage anyone to do homeschooling.
My own parents’ motives and abilities were not aligned with good educational outcomes.
I was homeschooled by such parents as you describe, and I still have social difficulties in my 30’s because of it. I also wasn’t hugged at all, but I don’t think that alone would have fixed it 😛
I was homeschooled in the US and no such testing was required, and it still is not required in my state. I think it absolutely should be required if homeschooling is going to continue to be allowed.
I was “homeschooled”, along with my many siblings, by Southern Baptist parents. I couldn’t really read until I was 9, and my younger siblings until even later. My older siblings had it marginally better, but not by much.
I was horrendously under-socialiazed, and I still struggle with debilitating social anxiety to this day. Although I should emphasize that a couple of my siblings are very socially competent and relatively well-adjusted, so I’m not sure how much of my issues in that domain are nature vs. nurture.
It always made me feel awful and dumb to hear peers at church talking about school-related things and what subjects they were learning, because I had no idea what they were talking about, which exacerbated my social difficulties. In my teenage years I started to understand what was happening, and I practically had to beg my mother for any kind of instructional material. I taught myself algebra with the help of internet friends. I still distinctly recall how utterly unscientific and creationist-bent was a biology textbook I got; it was so bad that even I was questioning it at the time.
My younger siblings were eventually allowed to participate in a homeschooling “coop” after my younger brother begged for something. Homeschool coops involve homeschool families getting together to have some semi-structured classes, usually something like once a week. Said brother took a “psychology” class there, the textbook for which was written by a guy with a business or economics degree and no background in psychology, and it said mental illness was the result of sin.
Home schooling in my state is ridiculously under-regulated. All you have to do is be registered with a private school as homeschooling and submit transcripts that comply with the state education requirements. That’s literally it. My mother fabricated them - the records say I took Spanish in high school, but I couldn’t have told you much beyond “hola”.
I went to college with what was essentially a fake high school diploma. I languished in my 20’s. I got a master’s degree in my 30’s, but I was lucky and happened to be gifted when it came to academia; most homeschool kids aren’t so fortunate. Most of my siblings have not managed to actualize their potential. I myself could have been doing much more much earlier if I hadn’t gotten a woman pregnant during college because I’d never had anyone tell me to use a condom. In retrospect, my parents’ duress at learning that I was having a child out of wedlock is almost comical for having been essentially self-induced.
I don’t know if homeschooling should be banned outright (as I’m aware of select cases where some parents weren’t neglectful and it was actually a better option for some kids due to various circumstances), but something needs to change. At a minimum, I think homeschoolers should be required to do the same state standardized testing as required in public schools in order to ensure they’re not being outright neglected like I and my siblings were.
My child is attending public school, which has had it’s own set of issues (bullying and a shocking amount of violence, for starters), but it’s a marvel to me the gap between what she knows and what I knew at her age. She’s learning things that I still haven’t. She’s better off for it.
Tl;Dr: don’t homeschool, do improve public school.
Right, do we not remember PRISM? Edward Snowden is still living in exile in Russia.
They don’t need to tap your router when they already tap the routes.
Right, like, … I can imagine how some of the sociopathic fools who tend to find themselves in executive positions could be fooled into thinking this was a sensible cost-saving measure… But anyone who’s capable of an ounce of reasoning, or who has any basic understanding of generative AI or statistics, shouldn’t need more than a few seconds to realize why this could not ever provide output that would reliably emulate a survey of actual humans.
Or in cases like this, use a different name and just say it’s an homage or something.
I find kidney or garbanzo beans a good substitute.
People are, in fact, hot garbage at risk assessment. See, for example, how many people refused to mask/vax during the height of the pandemic, and the concurrent death rates…
I’m in the southern US. I’ve heard a couple of the doctors I work with say negative things about Trump, but none have said anything positive. Mind you, I work in mental health, and people in this field tend to skew left.
It is indeed the nurses who are more a mixed bag. I’ve even met a couple who have become antivaxxers since COVID, and it boggles my mind.
I am so placated right now.
Can we just stop putting these people with no background in health in charge of health systems? The hubris is astonishing.
I mean, what next, are we going to put a TV host in charge of the military, or a wrestling business executive in charge of education?
Right, like, who did you think you were making surveillance tools for? Because it wasn’t Mr. Rogers.
Also, sometimes people can catch something without being aware of it.
Not just sometimes, a lot of the time. STD’s are often asymptomatic, especially in men. The majority of HPV infections have no symptoms, but they can cause cervical and other cancers (and warts!). Even with HIV, an estimated 13% of people who have it don’t know they have it (per hiv.gov).
Not just suicide assistance chat bots, but suicide promotion chat bots.
Smile by Lily Allen (the music video is unhinged)
Self Destruct by Between Friends (totally hinged)