Behind the apparent waffling, the one constant is the administration’s effort to direct hatred towards China. You have American military leaders predicting an invasion of Taiwan in a specific time window. It’s all a circus.
Not saying that the ultra-wealthy have the right to be tyrants, but "peasants" of today's age have a quality of life that is orders of magnitudes better than peasants in the feudal age. This simple truth seems to get lost so easily when talking about inequality in a vacuum.
Then we might have reached the point to discuss whether it’s enough to lift the worst-off to some minimum where they can survive or whether we’re in a position now to also enable participation on broad scale.
Right now it looks like wealth is self-enforcing. Across certain thresholds, you can get an expert or have the network to help with your taxes, legal issues, investment strategy and so on. Maybe you even inherited it all from your parents. There are certainly prominent counter examples of people who crossed these thresholds with their own hard work. The majority of people does not.
Democracy was always influenced by wealth, now it looks like it can easily be taken over. The richest people are buying their seats in the government, and the very rich (but not the richest) feel like they have to protect their wealth by politically endorsing it.
Folks from a given country tend to network with and feel more comfortable with people from said country, affecting their hiring and promotion practices. That’s only natural.
I’m an immigrant and I’ve never felt that way. The U.S. has a melting pot of cultures with everyone able to relate to everyone in some way shape or form. Generally with food. Americans eat German food, Italian food, Indian food, Cantonese food etc. and best of all, we fusion them together…curry pizza for ex.
It seems like Team Ding's strategy was to survive until tie breaks, where he would have been the favorite. Given Ding's form, they probably didn't believe he could reliably win games in classical versus an in-form Gukesh.
As such, Ding went for draws in multiple games with clearly superior positions that someone like e.g. Magnus Carlsen would have played out and won. I'm sure they regret that strategy now.
1) A nation's average score essentially has no relationship with the quality of its research institutions - only the top 1-5% matter - and that top 5% might just happen to contain a lot of immigrants.
2) The quality of research institutions is way more than e.g. summing the horsepower of the population of the containing nation. Reputational inertia attracting top talent is a real social phenomenon with more than a trivial effect.
I question the emphasis on averages. Moving the average of a country as big as the USA is very hard, with questionable ROI.
The top N% in any given subject is going to drive a nation's progress. We aren't going to be putting tens of millions of Americans into jobs where their output is highly dependent on e.g. their mathematical knowledge and ability.
Isn't it time to do away with the outdated goal of training everyone to be a well-rounded unicorn, and let students meaningfully specialize before ~20-30% of their life has expired?
For a sample size of 1, I'm confident I'd be significantly more valuable economically in adulthood if I could have specialized in e.g. math at an early age, rather than spending countless hours on subjects that I had little interest in and barely use today.
Who gets to pick and choose the kids' specialization ?
I don't agree with the premise (that early specialization is good), but setting that aside deciding what a 4th grader should focus on for the rest of their life feels like an impossible task.
You can't account for whether they'll like the more advanced subjects (i.e. they like 4th grade literature class but will bail at languistic analysis) and have no idea how they'll change even 3 years later as they hit puberty.
At 4th grade I totally and definitely wanted to be a military jet fighter, and stayed in that phase for a solid 3 or 4 years. I'm pretty glad I learned other things as well.
Sure, making a decision is possible, and parents have the authority to deal with the aftermath. The same way some decide their kid will be an elite pianist and commit 100% to it as soon as they can.
IDK what you're talking about. Clearly you haven't read:
The Giver
Divergent
The Maze Runner
And all other sci-fi young-adult distopian novels where they clearly determine what 4th graders will be for the rest of their lives based on genetics. There are also some movies (practically documentaries, really) of the same books.
a friend and former neighbor of mine was a college physics professor. He is vehemently against education tracking and early bucketing of students into potential career tracks. His early scores would have led him to a life of manual labor, yet his true love and gift was mathematics, and he shared that with the world for a whole career.
The 11+ in the UK was extremely reliable -- and it was possible to get an education later if one really wanted to (and could find the time). The 11+ was basically an IQ test that didn't depend (much) on the curriculum.
What subject did you learn in school that you perceive to be useless today? Honestly, I think the baseline learning in math, english, history, and science are all great and should still remain.
That's not to say there aren't useless classes and I think the second language course shouldn't be a hard requirement but otherwise I'm not sure what to the cut. Even PE is key for health.
The issue is that specializations can be obsoleted by changes in technology and that teaching a citizenry how to think is the surest way to collapse your society.
Only an elite sliver[1] of students get the "well rounded unicorn" training experience. The vast majority attend slightly to severely underfunded public universities where they aren't allowed to take more than a cursory set of electives.
Of course there's a tremendous amount of value in more clear and more beautiful communication, but it's hard to measure directly so when the state wants to cut your operating costs, they're the first to go. Never mind that humanities classes are cheap as hell to run, and thus give a fantastic ROI.
Very good programmers aren't able to read prose well enough to identify the absolute dreck that AI tools generate. They aren't able to think critically about media well enough to identify the bullshit that they're surrounded by. I'm all for improved math education, but a few hours per week with a great teacher and a cart won't patch those gaps.
1) Ivy Plus institutions have about 100k undergraduate students. There are 15 million undergraduate students in the US. More than 99% of undergraduate students are not at an Ivy League or similar institution.
tl;dr: “You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons. So you won’t be a boring little shite the rest of your life.” -Frank McCourt
Aren't you good at math? Counting those hours should be easy.
Which obviously isn't a productive comment, but the small demands of K-12 aren't holding back math superstars, nor are the small demands required for an undergraduate degree.
I mean, I have an engineering degree from University of Michigan and I am only fairly good at math (but not particularly high achieving), so maybe my experience isn't instructive.
React and similar frameworks have made it easier to manage a given level of complexity. The complexity of app features have adjusted and will continue to adjust to the new frontier enabled by said frameworks.
reply