You might have a point. Personally I go out of my way to make sure that people think I’m arguing in good faith. I think the absolute worst thing is to give someone, especially someone who is one the fence, any reason to think I’m just like the people he’s moving away from. Some of them have been told that everything not originating from Trump-approved media is Fake News, and this picture of Hegseth is definitely fake news.

It seems like there’s almost certainly a confounding variable here: the kids who are likely to engage in criminality are also the ones most likely to do poorly in school, skip classes, and be held back.

You’re conclusion doesn’t follow. Case in point: kids who are kicked out of school are more likely to become criminals because they are children and have potentially lost the only thing remaining in their lives that kept them on any path of any kind. And they don’t have to start dealing drugs and robbing people with all the extra time they have. A kid who has dropped out or been expelled can still be charged with truancy in most jurisdictions, and their parents charged with the same crime and fined (up to $1,000 in many places). An underage child can be taken from their parents based on truancy violations alone. Then there’s loitering, trespassing, panhandling, and a whole mess of other non-violent offenses that give a high school-aged child a criminal record.

A person isn’t a criminal until they’ve committed a crime. They aren’t a convict until they’ve been found guilty of crime. Most of the kids being expelled, suspended, sent to Alternative Learning “SuperMAX” Centers are non-violent offenders. They are put out because they can’t behave.

The argument from here is often that we have to put the undesirables somewhere. After all, it’s not fair to sacrifice the education of the other, well-behaved students. I agree. I also assume that most people would want to help these children. On that assumption, I’ll finish this post with two bits of info:

• COPS In Schools (CIS) was created after the Columbine shootings. The grant appropriated $750-million to hiring police offers (School Resource Officers or SROs) for placement in schools. Despite their fancy title, these are police officers and they can and do, at a frightening rate, arrest children.
• In 2022, a bipartisan bill, the 2022 Bipartisan Safe Communities Act, was enacted. It granted $1-billion dollars to the nationwide development of mental health resources (counselors, social workers, programs) in schools, and the entire country rejoiced. In 2024, the Trump admin cut the grant because of DEI.

We’ve chosen to police children instead of help them.

Problem is that the school-to-prison pipeline is a very real thing and kids that are held back or don’t finish school are far more likely to end up in prison than those that finish. The way school systems work in most of the US, the differences in outcomes for those with and without a high school diploma are stark and depressing. Finishing is as important as the education itself.

Read: End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale

Me to my lab.

To be fair, this picture was on the front page here for 3 or 4 days and was clearly chosen in bad faith by the outlet because Nazi.

Not saying I don’t want him to walk in front of a moving bus, but everyone knows for a fact at this point that this administration will weaponize anything they can. The Irish Star should know better, but a Nazi salute that wasn’t gets clicks so here we are.

If it wasn’t in the beginning, it was after Folding Ideas/Dan Olson released “Line Goes Up”.

Jeez. I know that’s a mind fuck.

For the curious ones, from Psychology Today:

“A larger amygdala is primarily associated with increased anxiety, heightened emotional reactivity, and stress-related disorders, often acting as a hyper-active “threat detector” Symptoms frequently include persistent fearfulness, depression, irritability, and hypervigilance, as the brain over-processes neutral stimuli as threats.”

Whoever made the original meme is an absolute moron.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201311/the-size-and-connectivity-the-amygdala-predicts-anxiety

There was a burger place in my town that was owned and operated by a bunch of women who called themselves a lesbian collective. It was a great hang and the burgers were very, very good.

They basically operated on this sentiment. If you were a dick, you were out. If you thought they were being dicks, you either adjusted your attitude or went hungry. Dead simple, and it worked. They were thriving.

And I don’t mean to make it sound like Patrick Swayze was working the door. It was the exact opposite. Good people running a good establishment serving good food who didn’t take shit off assholes. It’s surprising how much better a place feels for the customers when the employees get to have their dignity.

Unfortunately, they closed during COVID like most of the mom & pops around here. I miss it so much.

Maybe. LLMs are free(ish), meanwhile a single trip to the ER can leave a person destitute. Maybe that’s not so bad (it is) if the ER visit is for something actually urgent, but somewhere between 27% and 40% of ER visits are non-urgent and most are treatable by a PCP. But… ERs have to treat you while, in the US, a primary care physician can look you right in the eyes and turn you away because you have no money.

People don’t want to admit that AI does some good because the companies that own these LLMs are as corrupt as any other and the implications of the corruption of this tech are horrifying. But for health care, including mental health, LLMs are an unexpected godsend.

Uscher-Pines, L., Pines, J., Kellermann, A., Gillen, E., & Mehrotra, A. (2013). Emergency Department Visits for Nonurgent Conditions: Systematic Literature Review. American Journal of Managed Care. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4156292/

Raven, M. C., et al. (2024). Emergency Department Visits That Could Be Managed at Other Care Sites. JAMA Network Open. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2813806

Note to self: convince cute guy friend to try Mint.

Thanks for the tip.

If she’s nominated, it’s a fix. Classic authoritarian playbook: maintain the illusion of democracy by propping up an opponent that you aren’t likely to lose to. Then, stuff the ballot boxes anyway.

Yes! (I’m a little biased since it’s my favorite color.)

2010s, OMG they were everywhere. It was just a thing. Veganism became super trendy and people hopped on the bandwagon. Now that it’s not cool anymore, most of them have hopped onto another bandwagon or have aged out of chasing trends altogether. But they’re always out there. Right now, I hear a lot about K-Pop, Formula 1, and… third places. That last one catches me off guard because I have a related degree and when I was in school the concept was relatively obscure, so it catches me off guard, but in a good way (I work in a museum which charges for entry).

Anyway, eventually enough pretentious attention-seekers hop on the bandwagon and annoy enough people that they become the subject of ridicule. They move to the next thing, and the OGs get to be the butt of the joke for a generation. It blows.

Can “Linux” be another color? Red pillers are incel neo-Nazi douchebags.

Hey man, if you haven’t figured out yet that these super popular military games are being directed by the government somehow, then I don’t know what to tell you.

This isn’t much of an own. They vibe coded an OS. The fact that it works at all is enough. Days are numbered.

You actually blew my mind here. It never occurred to me that they might actually use ChatGPT to run the country. I was thinking unmanned drones, data combing/surveillance.

🤯🤯

Dear smart glasses wearers,

You’re colossal pieces of shit. And dumb as a bag of socks, morons who are paying companies for the privilege of spying on strangers without their consent. You’re helping to enable a world where privacy literally doesn’t exist and every public moment of every person’s life, whether they want to participate or not, is being mined and monetized by billionaires.

You are lower than pond scum. You’re the shit under the back of the toilet bowl that has never been cleaned. You are actually stupid. Like, actually braindead. You are paying actual money to be exploited. At least Facebook and Instagram are free. Seriously, what kind of dumbass would pay to have Mark Zuckerberg sit on their face all day? Fucking idiots. 🤣

Elaborate, plz.