To be fair, and I can't believe I am even defending Jared Kushner of all people, but that $2.5M donation was made in 1998. That was a very high donation for the time. The price of tuition and academic donations has absolutely rocketed in the nearly three decades since then (way ahead of general inflation). That's equivalent to at least a $10M donation nowadays.
If someone pays $10M for their kid to get into the school, that's not a legacy admission; that's dynamic pricing. Legacy admissions are where the person getting in pays no more than the normal rate of tuition.
Same with people fleeing from school systems that were still locked down to ones that had since reopened.
I don't think this is about wokeness per se though, just people literally leaving institutions that are closed in favor of ones that are open. Like switching up your regular bar if it stops being open on one of the main nights you used to go there.
But suppose that your regular bar served absinthe, and offered 12-hour/day child care?!
I'm coming around to the thesis that compulsory education is fundamentally systematic child-care to enable parents to participate in post-industrial employment and labor without needing to be around too much, attempting to raise their bothersome kids at home.
We had "latchkey kids" in the 1980s or so, and nowadays we've got parents ignoring their children at home while working from the kitchen table, or in the den.
With the rise of feminism, "equal pay for equal work", and girlbosses, there's basically nobody left who knows how to raise children, or wants to do it for free (not merely free, but the opportunity cost of skilled employment), so it makes sense for the State to expand public education as much as humanly possible so that children are mostly out-of-the-way and never home, except to sleep.
Parents are spending like 2X of their time on their children now than they did decades ago, so your overall thesis is exactly backwards. Parenting is perceived as a much more intensive activity now, which is so many people are having fewer (or no) kids. The reason seems to be safety culture: Despite society actually being much safer than it was back then, parents don't perceive this to be true, thus children aren't allowed out to play on their own like they used to be. It used to be common that children would be out all day every day planning amongst their own, and only came back for dinner and then bedtime curfew. And that included getting themselves to and from school when school was in session.
Sure. But let's look at where we are now. If you're blocked from viewing an account, you need to switch to a different account (possibly in an incognito window rather than adding the account?) and explicitly load the tweet in question.
Hold up, how does the blocked person even know about the tweet? That should be an indication that we're not talking about reality any more.
The purpose of the block button, which Elon still doesn't understand, is to remove your posts from that person's algorithmic feed. Make it so that they don't get exposed to or notifications about your content, at least without creating a new account (not much you can do about that).
Why does that matter? Harassment. There are tons of people on Twitter, with large followings, that dunk-tweet or otherwise harass people, and in doing so end up triggering a brigade. If you've ever had the misfortune of being the victim of one of these negative engagements, you would understand how much this sucks. It destroys usability of the app as you have to wade through literally hundreds of cheap variation of middle school insults just to find any legitimate content.
You can't block the hordes of marauding masses, but if you block the key instigators, the problem goes away. They can't interact with you or subtweet you, yes, but they ALSO aren't notified of the things you say, and therefore aren't likely to spread links to your content in private group chats where this trolling behavior is organized.
You can autistically insist that akshully the block feature doesn't prevent someone from jumping through some hoops to view your tweets, but that's missing the point. It still solves a real world problem in its current form.
Private browsing doesn't work because Twitter basically requires users to be logged in to see anything. So it really requires having a separate burner Twitter account you'd use to follow people who've blocked you on your main. It's a decent bit of extra effort that also requires a second phone number at this point.
Ideally blocking an account should block every account sharing that phone number (though it shouldn't tell you about the other accounts being blocked, since that would deanonymize which accounts share a phone number).
I block people on Twitter all the time, but I can't even remember the last time I had to block anyone on reddit (it was years ago). This speaks to the different models between the two -- on reddit I'm only interacting on specific subreddits, which because I've chosen them, have much nicer and more reasonable people than "all of Twitter". Twitter is always just nonstop fighting and yelling.
It has become weaponized. If someone blocks you, they can see your posts but you can't see theirs, and there is a good chance they will block you if you get into any kind of long argument where they feel personally insulted that they are being disagreed with. Once you are blocked you cannot block them, so they will always see your posts but you can't see their their posts and there is no recourse for this, it is just is, forever. So you end up proactively blocking people so that can't happen.
Someone needs to analyze this as game theory and write a paper on it. It is so poorly thought out and implemented that it would be funny if reddit didn't have a monopoly on long form written discussions on a lot of topics.
You can block users that block you -- if you know their username. But you don't know who has blocked you, and if they block you, you don't get to see their posts any more/
And you wouldn't notice if anyone blocked you -- that's the whole point -- but entire posts and threads could be right under your nose and hidden.
Regardless of whether it affects you or not -- it is ill conceived, does not accomplish its stated goal, and is easily abused by bad actors and thus should be heavily revised or removed.
> So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat
Where are you getting this part from? There's no evidence that the batteries were triggered to overheat; indeed doing so would be counter-productive, as it would cause the people holding the devices to know something is wrong and potentially move them farther away from their own body. The pagers exploded suddenly without warning. The only trigger/detonation involved was setting off the high explosive. The battery was uninvolved, only used to make the pager itself work.
It's war. Much worse things have been happening in this war already (e.g. Hezbollah explicitly targeting Israeli residential areas and killing civilians). By contrast this action seems much more targeted and justifiable.
If your bar for taking action is "there can't even be a chance of hurting a civilian", then your army can't do anything, and your entire civilian populace is slaughtered when it's taken over by the enemy intent on destroying your country.
You're forgetting that tens of thousands of Israelis from the north of Israel have been homeless and internally displaced since shortly after October 7th when Hezbollah started indiscriminately targeting Israeli residential neighborhoods in North Israel with rockets, artillery, and ATGMs, killing several civilians. This is not a tenable state of affairs, not militarily, nor politically. Israel is going to address it one way or another, one day or another, and perhaps they're starting now.
So in one sense you're right that it's to keep their population at bay -- because their population is absolutely fed up with the situation in North Israel and how people have been homeless for nearly a year now and a huge swath of the northern part of the country, will billions of dollars in real estate in total, is uninhabitable. And if this government can't provide security for its citizens, which is the most important thing a government can do by the way, then it will be replaced with one that can.
I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.
I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.
you're looking at the wrong videos. I saw videos with people's hands blown off, massive holes in their bodies, etc. reportedly something like 15-20gr of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate. Massive wounds.
I suspect it's going to matter a lot where the pager was relative to the person at time of explosion. Someone holding it in a closed fist vs reading it vs in a backpack vs in a pocket could all have very different wound patterns.
there's also going to be a bunch of plastic shrapnel either way. reports were saying that people's eyes were being hit, I think most likely by plastic shrapnel.
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