Schools are not about education but about privilege, filtering, indoctrination, control, etc.

Many people attending school, primarily higher education like college, are privileged because education costs money, and those with more money are often more privileged. That does not mean school itself is about privilege, it means people with privilege can afford to attend it more easily. Of course, grants, scholarships, and savings still exist, and help many people afford education.

“Filtering” doesn’t exactly provide enough context to make sense in this argument.

Indoctrination, if we go by the definition that defines it as teaching someone to accept a doctrine uncritically, is the opposite of what most educational institutions teach. If you understood how much effort goes into teaching critical thought as a skill to be used within and outside of education, you’d likely see how this doesn’t make much sense. Furthermore, the heavily diverse range of beliefs, people, and viewpoints on campuses often provides a more well-rounded, diverse understanding of the world, and of the people’s views within it, than a non-educational background can.

“Control” is just another fearmongering word. What control, exactly? How is it being applied?

Maybe if a “teacher” has to trick their students in order to enforce pointless manual labor, then it’s not worth doing.

They’re not tricking students, they’re tricking LLMs that students are using to get out of doing the work required of them to get a degree. The entire point of a degree is to signify that you understand the skills and topics required for a particular field. If you don’t want to actually get the knowledge signified by the degree, then you can put “I use ChatGPT and it does just as good” on your resume, and see if employers value that the same.

Maybe if homework can be done by statistics, then it’s not worth doing.

All math homework can be done by a calculator. All the writing courses I did throughout elementary and middle school would have likely graded me higher if I’d used a modern LLM. All the history assignment’s questions could have been answered with access to Wikipedia.

But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t know math, I would know no history, and I wouldn’t be able to properly write any long-form content.

Even when technology exists that can replace functions the human brain can do, we don’t just sacrifice all attempts to use the knowledge ourselves because this machine can do it better, because without that, we would be limiting our future potential.

This sounds fake. It seems like only the most careless students wouldn’t notice this “hidden” prompt or the quote from the dog.

The prompt is likely colored the same as the page to make it visually invisible to the human eye upon first inspection.

And I’m sorry to say, but often times, the students who are the most careless, unwilling to even check work, and simply incapable of doing work themselves, are usually the same ones who use ChatGPT, and don’t even proofread the output.

And republicans will still say that mainstream media has a heavy left bias, and they don’t trust them.

“Why sex?”

10/10 starter question, no notes.

This headline is wildly misleading.

From the study itself that was used to justify the ruling:

there [was] insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ

The determination about lower IQs in children was based primarily on epidemiology studies in non-U.S. countries

Interesting, I wonder why they didn’t conduct these studies in the U.S, y’know, where this is supposedly a big issue for the EPA to take action on.

There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts.

Great, if we find out the total consumption is too much, we can simply have people not need to buy things like mouthwash, or certain extra-flouride toothpastes as much. Doesn’t seem like a water supply problem, seems like more of a “consumers buying too much of products they don’t need” problem.

I can’t find even a single source online that mentions any area with a flouride level above the maximum recommended amount by the CDC and EPA. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the idea that this is something the EPA truly needs to take any action on.

It looks like organizations like the “Flouride Action Network,” an anti-flouride organization, are celebrating this.

The studies I could find cite differences in IQ with a few points maximum, and this is seemingly primarily due to heavy levels of consumption of flouride by pregnant women, not by the children themselves.

To me at least, it seems like they should be recommending specifically pregnant women stop using mouthwash while they’re pregnant, and that very young children don’t use mouthwash. Not that they need to “take action” over drinking water flouride levels.

Just a reminder that these patents, while bad, are nowhere near as bad as what might be authorized by new legislation in the U.S. which could re-open the door to “on a computer” patents.

(i.e. “Picture galleries, on a computer” “Healthcare, through a computer” “Dating, through a computer” etc)

IP Law is a mess.

I prefer using the self checkout, I don’t consider it work, because I also consider it work to mentally deal with meaningless small talk, and to deal with waiting in line for ten minutes when I’m buying just a few items.

You might feel like it’s work for you, and that’s fine. You can then use the staffed checkout lanes, which are explicitly there for anyone who dislikes doing self checkout.

The problem isn’t doing “work” by using self checkouts, the problem is capitalist cost-cutting, which would be done with or without self checkout machines.

And on top of that, even in cases where it is demonstrably true that any given group/population/region, say, does more crime than the average, it almost always boils down to the fault being laid on the existing discrimination against that group causing further harm.

Like how racists will say that black people do more crime because they’re fatherless, (and that it’s a result of their culture that causes the fatherlessness) but don’t see the problem with specifically over-policing those neighborhoods and arresting the fathers they say need to be there for the kids, thus perpetuating the cycle in the first place.

Even if it were true that, somehow, miraculously, trans people did indeed do more crime than the average for their gender or sex, they also face multiple times higher abuse rates than non-trans people, which is known to perpetuate cyclical violence. But yet, somehow, they still do the same amount of crime as everyone else (at least, comparative to their birth sex, generally.)

"MtF transitioners were over 6 times more likely to be convicted of an offence than female comparators and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence. The group had no statistically significant differences from other natal males"^{https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/}

LGBTQ+ people are also more likely to be incarcerated after being convicted, and were more likely to serve long prison sentences. The graphic cites prison service data, the amount of currently incarcerated people, as a way to determine the rate of sexual offending, which is is a patently bad measure of offending rates.

I could see this as a way to make fun collage photos of yourself (i.e. you in multiple different poses in a wide shot of you in front of some cool mural/object)

But I feel like this then takes the meaning out of being there in the photo when you directly edit your entire presence into the photo.

I can understand tweaking eyes to remove red-eye, or replacing the background with a slightly better lit one from a different photo in the same shot, because that still captures the original essence of the shot, but when half the people in a photo quite literally weren’t even next to the others, it doesn’t feel like one side of the photo recognizes the presence of the other side, because they weren’t really there.

Nowhere near that amount of people was actually added to the population that would need housing.

Not to mention the fact that there are over 11 million year-round vacant properties in the US, 6.7 million of which are simply held off the market, and 3.1 million are for rent, but not receiving any tenants year round (a tactic often used to artificially keep rents high for surrounding properties)

There’s also an additional 3.5 million homes that are “seasonal” properties, (i.e. vacation homes) that are still perfectly good for housing human beings, but are only actually used for part of the year.

There are an estimated 662,000 unhoused people in the United States, (Including those already in temporary shelters) so only a fraction of the available empty housing would completely house every homeless person in the United States.

The problem isn’t a made up “crisis” from immigrants, it’s a lack of care for other human beings that drives landlords, property investors, and multi-home owning individuals to hoard housing that people need to survive.