But once we get approval to for thermonuclear detonations in the middle east, we can modify the plan. We don’t need to dig a new canal if we just blow up any Iranian sites capable of attacking ships in the strait.

There is a big difference between creating an incidental inconvenience, (such as by assembling 10,000 people whose mere presence disrupts traffic patterns around the protest site) and deliberately targeting fellow victims of oppression (such as by assembling a few dozen people to obstruct thousands on a freeway).

The former is a great way to protest. The latter is counterproductive.

If those few dozen people move their obstructive protest from the freeway to the driveway of the richest person in town, they get the same media coverage and motivate hundreds to come out and join them.

Yawn.

And I don’t think you know how to protest. Hint: When the public walks away more pissed off about you than about your cause, your protest has failed. You have distracted the public away from your cause, not supported it.

Instead of legislation in support of your cause, they are backing legislation against you.

Yes, indeed. The conversation has started. But what conversation are they having? You seem to think they are talking about the cause being protested.

They aren’t.

They’re talking about the need for increased police powers to prevent such “anti-social” behavior. They’re supporting broad, authoritarian legislation specifically because it includes provisions against the kind of “protests” that make them late to work, late getting home, late picking up their kids from school, late to their doctors appointments.

The net effect of blocking general traffic is increased support for authoritarianism, and greater tolerance for brutality against demonstrators, as we saw from tribal police in Nevada three years ago.

The conversations you want people to be having only come when your protest narrowly targets the people doing the oppressing. When you’re intention is nothing more than pissing off their victims, you distract them from taking effective action, not focus their attention.

These age gates don’t achieve their stated objectives.

What they will do is allow “KidGroomer dot com” to request an age signal from a visitor. When that signal indicates the visitor is an adult, they can provide an app designed to inform parents about how to protect their kids online.

When that signal indicates the visitor is a child, they can provide an app for connecting kids with their local van-driving puppy owner and purveyor of free candy

Perhaps having your OS announce a user’s age to anyone who asks is a big fucking problem.

No, what you need to do is disrupt the livelyhood of the rich cunts. That means destroying the productivity of their businesses. How do you completely stop all productivity from something like a Tesla manufacturing plant? By making sure noone can get to work to work the machines.

Excellent idea! Shut down the plants the oligarchs are using to fund their oppression. Kudos!

How do you stop the businesses from selling the products of the oligarchs? Make sure they’re stuck in trafic, along with their customers.

Blocking traffic? Targeting their customers? Lumping customers in with the problem class? Keeping working-class people from getting to their jobs, or getting back home again? You just made an enemy of the general public. You aren’t “protesting”. You aren’t “bringing awareness.” You’re campaigning for an authoritarian response against protesting. You’re inviting expansion of laws and enhanced penalties for jaywalking, obstructing traffic, and protesting in general.

This attitude is what I am talking about. You aren’t driving a wedge between reasonable people and their oppressors. You’re declaring that reasonable people do not exist. Just to continue going about their lives, the general populace has to team up with their oppressors to shut down your obstruction. You’re driving a wedge between the people and your cause, rather than using your cause to drive a wedge between the people and their oppressors.

There is definitely a right and a wrong way to protest; you’ve given us examples of both. Thank you!

Picketing that community. Blocking that community. No rich cunts in, no rich cunts out. Disrupt the people who are creating the problems, not the general public just trying to go about their lives.

Found the oligarch.

I like the sentiments of “You don’t need a permit” and “You don’t have to say ‘peaceful protest’”, but there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to protest.

It’s not a matter of what you choose to do. It’s a matter of who you choose to do it to. Focus your efforts on anyone in the “Problem Class” (anyone worth 8 figures or more) and you can do no wrong.

Intentionally inconvenience any member of the general public, even slightly, and you can do no right.

Move your obstructive protest away from the freeways used by the general public, and take them to the entrances of a gated community where the problem people live. Obstruct the problem class. Don’t oppress the general public.

Edit: Huh. A bit more support for fenced-in decamillionaires than I would have thought.

Parents, schools, employers, and governments, already use content controls to restrict users from accessing undesirable sites and services on the internet.

Searching the terms “content blocking” or “parental controls” will get you lists of apps and services doing just that.

Parents already have the capability. This law doesn’t provide any additional capability for parents to parent their kids. This law seeks, instead, to remove the power and responsibility of parenting from the parents, and assign it to pornographers. They want the operators of adult websites around the world to be the ones determining whether or not to provide content to their kids.

What this law actually does is provide a means for a website to determine whether an adult or a child is trying to access their content, and to use that information to decide what content to provide. The thinking is that a respectable services like Netflix will be able to decide to provide only age-appropriate content, blocking kids from adult content.

However, that also means that services like “KidGroomer dot com” will be able to provide different content to adults than it does to children. To an adult, they can portray themselves as a site that provides information on how to protect kids from grooming. But when a kid visits, this law lets the site know it is a kid. The site can now show them kid-targeted content, like how to get in contact with the nearest candy-giving stranger.

Perhaps we don’t actually want a website to be able to determine whether there is a kid on the other side of the screen.

All we can say from the given scenario is that the student has not demonstrated mastery of the subject material.

It could be that the teacher fucked up, and tested improperly. I’ve seen tests that didn’t reflect the subject matter; the teacher failed.

It could be that Mom or Dad were the ones completing the student’s assignments for them all year. The student never actually learned anything; the student failed.

If every student had the same experience, I’d be happy to point fingers at the teacher. But when virtually all her students pass, and this one “workaholic” kid can’t, that’s not on the teacher. That’s on the kid.

(Apparent) hard work is not evidence of mastery.

The UK uses single phase to the house. This is provided via one 240v hot and a neutral. Their final distribution transformer bonds one side of the output coil to ground and use it as a neutral, which makes the other side of the coil 240v relative to that ground.

The US uses split phase to the house. This is 240v provided via two opposing 120v hots and a common neutral. Their final distribution transformer is almost identical to the UK version: end to end, they have a 240v output. The difference is that instead of bonding one end of the output coil to ground and using it as a neutral for the other end, they instead bond the center of the output coil to ground and use that as a common neutral for both ends.

Not just solar - most grid-scale generators have this problem. “Black start” is the search term you want to look for, and Practical Engineering has a good video on the subject.

Basically, only a relative few grid generators are actually capable of black starts. The rest need the grid to be already functioning before they can tie in and start producing.

Ohio does something like that. We have separate contracts with a heavily regulated grid operator for distributing power, and our choice of generation companies for providing power.

The grid operator does our metering and billing, but forwards our generation charge to the provider we select.

Are you saying that electrical power should only be provided by government entities?

Should you be allowed to plug in a solar panel and provide power back to the grid?

Are you a government entity?

If you think you should be allowed to backfeed your own meter, you are calling for the grid to be operated as some sort of market. A regulated market, sure. But a market nonetheless.

The “natural monopoly” of electrical power is only on the distribution, not the generation of that power. It is reasonable for various generators to compete against each other to meet grid demand.

You should be able to push power back onto the grid. You should not be limited only to taking it off the grid. If you can put more on than you remove, you should be compensated for your generation at the market rate.

Assignments are not evidence of learning. Assignments are pressure for students to learn. They are motivation to spend time acquiring knowledge and practicing skills expected to be acquired from the class.

For students who master this knowledge and skill without that pressure, assignments are distractions from further study. They force the student to expend time and energy on previously-mastered material, rather than allowing them to focus on unmastered subjects or additional classes.

If I were building a grading rubric, I would say that the test score at the end of each unit is the minimum score recorded for any assignment in that unit. My tests would be killers: I would target 80% raw scores, but final test scores would be on a curve, with the median score being recorded as an “A”.

Score a 100% raw score on a unit test, and every assignment for that unit is raised to 100%. The student has demonstrated complete mastery of the subject matter; any grade less than 100% does not reflect their true capability.

Score an 80% raw score on the unit test, and every assignment for that unit is at least an 80%. A 95% assignment stays a 95%, but a 45% assignment is counted as 80%. Missing assignments are counted as 80%, not 0%.

I would go further: the raw score on the final exam replaces every lower grade in the grade book. You ace that indomitable horror of a final exam, you ace the class, regardless of how much effort you put in.

The purpose of a class is to instill a specific set of knowledge and skills.

The purpose of an assignment is to provide the student with sufficient pressure to study the expected knowledge, and practice the expected skills. The assignment is the pressure to learn; it is not evidence of learning.

To the student who has achieved mastery of that knowledge and skillset prior to completing the class, an assignment has no valid purpose. For such a student, the assignment is busywork, and serves only to distract the student from further study.

If your grading style does not allow for a student to demonstrate mastery and refuse busywork assignments, your grading is a problem.

A student with test scores equal or better than the class average does not deserve to fail your class for having refused assignments.

A student who ritualistically completes all of their homework assignments with excellent marks, but is entirely unable to pass a test on the subject matter, is a student who has failed your class.

There is a difference between providing the capability, and requiring that capability.

Under this law, something as simple as sharing a Google Drive could make you an “app store” and potentially liable for penalties.

These laws are specifically designed to be broadly interpreted. We have no idea just how widely the nets will be cast, either tomorrow, or 10 years from now. It is prudent to assume the absolute worst case.