It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.
Sometimes it does work out. For example, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox, spun out as an open source project, and now has its own foundation backing it, along with a board, etc.
Thanks - I wasn't aware about the M&A carve-out, which makes sense. It reads to me like clause (c) is the most relevant:
(c) all of the ownership interest of any subsidiary, may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold... has been carried on, so long as the buyer... carries on a like business therein.
and it prohibits competition "on a similar business". The Vite team would be blocked from competing against VoidZero, but Cloudfare isn't a similar business IMO, and they would be free to work on a private "Pronto" fork within Cloudflare (which is unlike the real-life Cloudflare/Vite scenario where they will continue public releases)
Maybe. It would require courts and nuance; cloudflare is in a lot of businesses nowadays. It rarely comes into effect regardless because people rarely spend less than a couple years at the acquirer, but regardless.
That’s not quite actually true and it is a bit more nuanced than that. For example, while non-competes and non-solicits are unenforceable in CA for employment agreements, they absolutely are enforceable for mergers and acquisitions.
The laws governing employment are a subset of the laws governing M&A.
I'm curious how does it work, you handover the tools you wrote, .bashrc/.zshrc, etc?
When I'm hired in a company (not contract), they wipe the harddrive when I leave (well, I also do it before I hand it over sometimes). So they don't get the tools (I take them with myself, it would be a waste to loose them)
The problem is that just like students, teachers are not all created equal.
My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.
I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.
Crazy that such a load bearing job isn't better funded and more respected. Arguably the most important job in society and the level of respect, pay and to some extent training (at least a lot of places require a masters for what that's worth) is absolutely not commensurate with it's importance.
I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.
Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.
I think the problem is people prefer to solve immediate problems affecting themselves (or their close kin) rather than long-term or indirect improvements, and education is the long-term project if there ever was one: magically improve things tomorrow, and you will only start to see the effects in 20 years.
I don't know how it is in your place, but where I'm from governments have — at least for the last 15 years — governed exclusively with a max horizon of 4 years (the time until the next elections). Everything is quick-fixes or patches that kick the can down the road. It's very hard to convince people to care and vote for you if you promise to show results over the next generations, vs if you bump up pensions next year or something.
Basically, to give a different example, that's in essence why you the response to "traffic is abysmal" is "we will widen the urban highways cutting through the city" rather than "we will implement a plan to actually redesign our city away from car-exclusiveness".
Multiple things can be true, because the goal is to optimize in aggregate.
- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)
- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others
Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.
* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?
> it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees)
That completely ignores the social and political aspects.
You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.
Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.
Entitled to your opinion, but this feels like an overly-complicated socio-political rationale for something that's equally explained by leadership laziness.
It's not rocket science to set up a continuous leader feedback mechanism.
Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.
If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.
The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.
Most teachers have strong union protections. It’s nearly impossible to fire one. Many districts now have a temporary period where they can be removed much easier. Once they have tenure it’s really difficult.
It is very respected in Finland. Having not many natural resources (trees / lumber aside) they made education their national resource. Teachers there are highly respected and have authority in the classroom. Masters degrees are required as well as multi-year in-classroom apprenticeships. Admission to education masters programs are highly competitive.
education is highly funded. teachers are not paid well because there is a perception that "anyone can be a teacher" (which is true in the sense that there is no particular enumerable qualification or credential that makes you a good teacher) so the market is full of people who decide that they should be a teacher (many should not, but there is no a priori way of knowing). supply high. a lot of education funding goes to things that are not teacher pay.
Education United States is not necessarily highly funded nor are all teachers necessarily good. Can you identify a good teacher? Yes you can. Will you get rid of the ones that are bad well not really.
I still remember all of the teachers that were really good and I remember some of the ones that were bad, the ones that were good. I wish that many of them could have lived long enough for me to say thank you.
For #1, some do, but many don't. What's offered differs a lot depend on the school district you work for.
For #2, the amount of uncompensated work and just general bullshit they have to put up with is in no way made up for by "having summers off". (Which they don't, really, as they'll often be doing professional development during the summer, and will be preparing for the start of the next school year well before it actually starts.)
(Source: my brother-in-law is an elementary school teacher in the US.)
For #4, is that universal? I feel like that's something that would depend on state or even on school district.
1. The ones I've seen were gold-plated. Nevertheless, omitting it when talking compensation is significantly misleading. Public school teacher unions are famous for getting very generous retirement and health care plans.
2. Professional development - teachers do opt to get "certs", which result in automatic pay raises. Unfortunately, those certs have no correspondence with better outcomes for the kids. Preparing - yes, this is the lesson plan thing. A teacher told me she worked her fingers to the bone all summer preparing lesson plans. I asked her why she didn't just use the ones from last year. She replied that they had to be individualized for each student. I asked how did she know which students she'd have, as they wouldn't be assigned until the fall? Oops!
4: I googled average number of years until full retirement benefits kick in.
lmao, you're completely out to lunch, my friend is a teacher in one of the most well funded districts in the entire country and it's a decent job but it's an incredible amount of work and he's not making an amazing wage considering how much he needs to work outside of school hours
i can only imagine the horrors faced by teachers even on the other side of the bay, much less in a red state that isn't the fourth largest economy in the world
tenure protections can be problematic, but so are activist parents, the system isn't great but it is necessary to some extent, your exposure to bad actors as a teacher is massive and requires commensurate protection, just stochastically you'll get parents trying to get you fired every once in a while
Do you have a more specific reply to factual points 1 .. 4?
There are about 3.5 million public school teachers in the US. The idea that they are incredible is not credible. As an Air Force brat, I attended many diverse public schools. Some teachers were good, some were not, most were ordinary folks. I don't recall any being incredible, though this teacher was definitely incredible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
In one of my classes in high school, the teacher always tested us with multiple choice tests (I presume because it makes the tests quick and easy to grade).
After a few tests, I noticed a pattern. Whenever one of the four answers was "all of the above" or "none of the above", that was the correct answer. So I went to the teacher and asked him about that. He leaned over conspiratorially and said "you're right. They're like that because the kids need a break." Then he laughed. I liked him, he was a good egg.
When I was little, my dad taught Air Force ROTC at the local university. He'd sprinkle the test with questions like "what is the insignia on a Soviet fighter jet?" On the classroom wall was a picture of a Soviet fighter jet. The students would still get it wrong. (The answer is "red star".) It was a favorite story of his.
Yep, and there is (rightfully) general distrust in giving teachers that much authority over students. Parents already have that authority, which is why a family environment conducive towards education is the most direct way to improve overall student outcomes. Trying to fix it in the school is bordering on pointless. In my country, boarding schools / boarding at another ...quieter... family member's house and attending a school near there was the most common solution among poorer people. Example: more-or-less sane mother sends off kid to uncles house during the school year to go to school and escape drunkard father. The kid visits on some weekends and most holidays.
Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.
Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to have vanishingly little success if at all.
That happened to me in high school. I was in "advanced" freshman bio. Teacher gave me a B. When my parents inquired during a parent-teacher conference, she said I looked like I wasn't paying attention.
Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...
Your observation could mean that overdiagnosis is a thing around you.
I have a close family member with actual attention deficit and extreme hyperactivity.
You cannot mistake it with normal bored kid.
It's like his brain works at 100% intensity all the time.
When you walk with him through the town, he has to touch every door knob, climb every tree, look into every single car, peep into every hole. In a room he finds new object so interesting that he absolutely has to investigate it, for like 30 seconds and then finds another thing and another and another. 24/7. You see his body is tired, almost falling asleep, but his brain won't stop, he keeps finding new distractions he can't ignore.
You would never mistake it for just a regular bored kid.
Not that all cases are simply the natural state of kids, but that it's overdiagnosed for that very reason.
"Oh your kid can't sit still and learn about some artificial topic by staring at whiteboards and pieces of paper all day? Better load 'em up with drugs, they clearly have ADHD!"
I voted you up, not because I think ADHD is a myth or doesn't exist, but because I think it's massively overdiagnosed, and what many people in popular culture call ADHD is often normal, even healthy, behavior.
> I'm not completely convinced that "ADHD" isn't just the natural state of kids who are bored most of the time.
Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.
I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.
I'm not certain I have either, but I'm also skeptical of blanket statements. Nothing, really, nothing? Do they have no imagination then? No value, no curiosity? ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?
> Do they have no imagination then? No value, no curiosity?
The opposite, but it doesn't mean the attention is held.
> ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?
If you remove "just", "to", and "of kids" then yes.
People—kids and adults—with severe ADHD struggle to manage in all sorts of rooms that others struggle dramatically less in, if they're undiagnosed and have no resources for dealing with it.
To me part of it is also that each generation intentionally seeks out what the last generation can't or won't fully adopt and adapt to. For the current generation it is AI. For my generation it was Wikipedia and online dating. It must certainly have seemed to our elders like we had little to no attention for the things they wished that we would devote our attention to.
If you look back through history, you don't suppose you might find a pattern of people saying, "Kids these days," do you?
Approximately nothing externally imposed will hold their attention, but ADHD hyperfocus is absolutely a thing: it's just hard to identify from the outside.
It's normal that such teachers exist. But management level should notice this kind of problems and react. I switched classes in age 8 exactly because of that – for some reason a teacher disliked me and/or my behavior and I was moved to another class. No big drama. It was in 1970, Soviet Union.
> I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
> When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
It’s not actually that unpopular; there are plenty of gifted programs, though the tide has turned to controversy around them more in recent years.
I continue to believe that gifted kids are special needs kids, and that they shouldn’t be in the same classroom as those who are struggling for all of their classes.
People don’t like to talk about gifted kids, except to imply that being “too smart” is somehow bad or unfair, and I think it does them a disservice.
Gifted kids get very, very bored, and lose interest quickly, when they aren’t challenged.
It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.
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