Bold to presume that we would want to survive it.

Fwiw Musk says that he wants to leave Earth and go to Mars, which is great news for the rest of us:-).

They’ve already been caught doing that - well, not for disinformation spreading but for engagement appearance, around the time Reddit was doing its IPO so needed to hike its stats to give to advertisers as quickly as possible. While entire posts, comment for comment, though with different usernames but the identical responses to the identical questions, and then deeper responses to those, and so forth.

So they don’t need the appearance of older accounts - they can manufacturer whatever they need, from scratch already. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they created “10 year old” accounts at will.

What if the USA decides to side with Russia against Germany?

First note that it’s enormously variable, with some college preparatory high schools being better than some colleges. The main thing is that education is a for-profit exercise, and now even government-funded ones behave like that too after No Child Left Behind. So like anything else, it’s whatever they can get away with selling their product with minimal input into in order to maximize the margin:-(.

Then above and beyond that, schools are partly paid for by the government, but also by the local district they are in, so schools in richer areas are going to be 1000x better than those in poorer ones. See e.g. this older John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) special: https://youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM.

Yes the purpose of Kurzgesagt is pop-sci. Hank and John Green are more college level (remember: American college is often equivalent to high school elsewhere in the world) and the likes of Innuendo Studios and CGP Grey can get fairly far away from dancing and deeper into philosophy.

The reason I brought up Kurzgesagt was that even that level is beyond what people want to see.

Farmers need education. Farmhands do not.

Anyway I was just attempting to use it as an example - we could substitute gas station attendant or fast food worker, etc. There are jobs where, for the job anyway while ignoring the quality of life for the actual person, formalized education is less necessary than for other jobs, e.g. doctor or lawyer.

But my example of using farmhand was not made up: farmers literally pulled their kids out of primary schooling in order to make use of them on the farm. Perhaps they supplemented it with homeschooling at other times when the crop cycles allowed… or perhaps not. But either way, the ways we use to measure intelligence - e.g. if we ask what country does the city of Athens belong to - the farmhands will appear extremely low in such rankings.

So long as someone else in the family does the planning work, someone who was not merely pulled out but who flunked out of primary schooling could exist in life by contributing purely manual but not much intellectual labor.

Perhaps I am being unfair with my language, so here’s an example if it helps clarify: this is a video combating vaccine disinformation campaigns. It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone’s questions about the situation. It is as perfect a video as I think can possibly exist - extremely bold words, but… accurate imho? Edit: oops, this is the one I meant, but notably the fact that there are multiple that fit this criteria also serves a different point as well!?:-)

However, instead of watching this, more people died in the USA from the pandemic than from all wars combined, and like so many other scenarios (e.g. gun violence) we will forever be ignorant of the true numbers because we are actively prevented from counting them.

This is literally, actually, full-on life vs. death, but people cannot be bothered to watch even so much as a 10-minute video to save their life, or the life of everyone around them including their entire family. And the nation that they claim to love and be patriotic for.

Knowledge can easily cure ignorance, but not much if anything can be done about obstinacy. Maybe if they suffer enough pain they may finally start to care enough to open up to listen a real answer, but brainwashing is so tough to attempt to break through.

That channel also deals with climate change, technology, etc. But to switch to a very different example, another one is the rise of fascism all around the world. Ian Danskin’s Innuendo Studios has a playlist for his series on The Alt Right Playbook that is as comprehensive and deep a collection on that topic as I have ever seen. One example of the series is I hate Mondays and another is There’s always a bigger fish. These in some ways are more important than knowledge about climate change or vaccines or gun control or whatever, bc it discusses what we as a society will do about those matters. But instead of watching such, and/or even reading the Constitution that they claim to love, people instead show up at the White House with the idea to literally behead people (January 6), and on the other side liberals always seem shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!?! at the actions of conservatives, despite how remarkably consistent they are.

With so much free, virtually instant knowledge (okay so less than an hour?) available to us all, and with an ad blocker needs nothing at all in return but even without one having to watch a handful of ads is nothing in the grand scheme of things - with all that is available, I can only conclude that people do not want that knowledge. i.e. people in both sides - liberal and conservative - remain in their ignorance by choice, bc it’s easier to watch something akin to a TikTok dance.

Exactly ^this. It makes sense to them that they “worked their way through college”, ignoring how that is no longer possible.

Tbh I’m not a fan of just handing out money to the predatory banks who screwed students over with those loans either, but damn we should do something. Like maybe educate ourselves on a topic prior to banning people from doing it, possibly, hopefully?

And then they go and say “that’s not how democracy works”, except when you win the majority so hard that you even overcome the electoral college effect then they simply overthrow democracy itself.:-(

There are indeed real facts, and real people, behind all those pithy sayings.

US education was abysmal before that already

Solid points all around, but I wanted to add one historical tidbit: at one point the USA had literally the best edumacashiun in the world. After WWII, the other nations (like the UK + those in the EU) were bombed all to hell & back whereas the USA was relatively fine. People like Bill Gates advocated strongly for US education funding, b/c it helped feed that behemoth giant of a corporation to have an already-educated workforce, funded by US tax dollars, that they could take advantage of.

We have fallen FAR down the world rankings since then. Tbf, some of that may reflect changes in measurements e.g. does “every” kid need one, or can some be excused to go be a farmhand without needing to finish? (this affects averaged measurements, but not peak ones, or the previously thus-filtered ones)

Who could oppose that?

I think you know who… there is one class that seems to go FAR out of their way to control the conversation to the end of “there is no class struggle” (or even “there is no such thing as class”?).

Someone else could write news then? People started doing that on YouTube - e.g. CPG Grey, Ian Danskin/Innuendo Studios, Hank & John Green, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Kurzgesagt, etc. It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.

If we do not value i.e. take care of things, we will lose them. In this case - and here I will use a generational term, b/c it refers to the only people in charge at the time it occurred - the Boomer (+ Great) generations chose this for the legacy of everyone who came after. Which is only the history of how we came to be here, but it is our choice to continue forward this way.

The word “think” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there… plus how many conservative voters these days even have college degrees? The TV (or radio) man says to vote one way, so they do, end of the matter as far as they are concerned. (extraordinarily sadly, no /s on this one)

I have noticed that the titles of many articles, yes even at The Guardian that generally has good content once you get past that, are written to generate maximum clicks.

You were not ignored by accident. It was a calculated decision to maximize profits, in a manner that controls the conversation and leaves you out in the cold.

Fuck corporate greed:-(.

But for you, my fellow human being who isn’t a hollowed-out shell i.e. CEO, I wish the absolute best outcome possible. (And me too.)

Maybe house prices will go down someday? I really am genuinely surprised at all that Biden('s administration) has managed to accomplish, but it was set back years before it even started by the pandemic, greedflation, and other economic and other forms of unrest. If we can get past this next election without a literal and actual bloody civil war… well then most of us will still die of climate change (gee, I am just full of positivity today aren’t I? sadly, that is the most positive take possible on that one:-|), but we might be able to make some headway? e.g. start incentivizing building houses further away from city centers, which WFH should help make possible - and even if you want to live in a city, the decrease in demand should help lower prices?

Anyway, all we can do is what we can do (aka not everything is within our control), so don’t stress too awfully much about it. We’ll die - we can’t change that - but hopefully we’ll have some good days between now and then:-).