Haven_Monahan's comments

"Consistency issues can usually be fixed with wizards."

Yes, the old "well...a wizard did it" DeusExMagic-User. Sooo useful for the DM, especially if you are the sort who keeps tweaking the map, and have players puzzled by the appearance of new landforms not present on their earlier version of the document....

I mean that a school that started for the express purpose of training Puritan Congregationalist ministers, and had mandatory Protestant chapel until 1926, now has coed dormitories, an LGBT club, and Atheists at the Divinity College.

Even for someone not particularly religious for the time(Calhoun eventually became a Unitarian), all that would be a little difficult for him to get his head around.

I mean, it could be worse. I imagine sometimes how Increase Mather would react to Harvard today, and I kinda understand where fundamentalist terrorists get their outrage from.

Sorry, we will have only binary & atom-thick appraisals of historic figures in the US today. John Calhoun == Bad; Grace Hopper == Good. And that's all you need to know.

The ones doing the renaming have no independent convictions of their own. Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.

What they do have instead is a hyperactive self-righteousness gland, which is easily tickled to orgasm by the thought of them being on the right side, the side of the angels, in any conflict. It is what passes for their conscience. This explains the drive to cast all historic conflicts in the most reductive & simplistic way possible. So much the easier to spooge over how progressive they are for hating on the wrong side

John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete. Yet, he can be dismissed with infantile invective ("human sewer"), as though he, like all antebellum Southerners was a monodimensional cartoon villain, like Decepticons who had an abiding interest in...cotton.

I am cheered by the fact that more and more normal citizens are seeing this performative outrage pantomime for the chauvinism-of-viewpoint that it is.

...who got his money from his parents and uncles. Moe Brown was also a quaker && robustly antislavery, but that did not stop him from bailing out his brothers during the war. Trying to extricate the triangle-trade money from the Brown family is like trying to wring the pink from a sunrise.

Brown as well. You really can't talk about the slave trade in colonial RI w/o mentioning John & Nick Brown.

Of course, the brand names of these colleges are too valuable to dump.

In fairness to JCC, I'm sure he'd look at the sort of things that go on at Yale these days, and insist that all mention of his name be removed from anything on campus.

The South, the South...God knows what shall become of her.

Time was, those were referred to as "pink-collar" jobs; probably b/c there was a preponderance of women doing them.

If nobody's brought it up, "Castle" by David Macaulay:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_(book)

(also made into a PBS program in the '80s)

Very nice book; also he has ones about building Cathedrals, Pyramids, Roman cities and New England water-mills.

As mentioned upthread & here, yes, the early Fieros did have a habit of catching fire. There were primarily two reasons for this:

GM refused to budget for a new engine for the car-it never really wanted to have a two-seater outside the Corvette, but after the second gas crisis, the turkish engineer who'd been agitating for what would become the Fiero sold it to management as an economic commuter car.

The idea was to save money by using components (including the existing engine) from GM's A-body front-wheel-drive sedans, amongst others. The Pontiac 2.5L engine was too tall to fit properly in the mid-engined Fiero, and with no money for a complete redesign, the solution was to install a shallower oil pan, making the whole engine run a quart low (at least) at all times. That four was also not especially resistant to burning/leaking oil; so it was always a risk that the engine would be starved of lubricant, overheat, seize and catch fire.

I also understand that there were problems with the factory wiring on the electric radiator fans, such that airflow was never properly managed in the engine compartment, leading to... overheating and fire.

These problems were eventually fixed, but a reputation for burning up at stoplights is a hard one to overcome with normal consumers.

(I say 'normal consumers' here. Lamborghini has made many fire-prone models, but Lamborghini buyers are Not Normal.)

I can respect them for their ability to control a classroom, to empathize with, and to motivate young children.

I cannot in any meaningful way respect, the breadth, rigor or quality of undergraduate ed-major programs in the US. Graduates of these programs may have respectable knowledge and skills-but that is an exception unique to the individual.

Apparently, the facts are misogynous. Damn, damn facts.

Citations, of course.

Or are you simply of the Nicholas Garaufis school of thought; namely, if the test isn't perfect, it can't possibly be used as a hiring tool? After seeing what Judge G did to the FDNY training program, I'd have half a mind to buy extra smoke alarms and fire extinguishers if I lived in the city...

Like a lot of people, I know some persons who would probably be excluded by the general approache I described upthread, and who ended up going into teaching and being really, really good at their specialty. That's why there should always be a way to make exceptions. That doesn't invalidate the principle that "book smart" isn't a bad criteria for new teachers, and that some tests can give a rough idea of how likely someone is to be so.

Cliched but true:

Tough cases make bad law. The plural of anecdote isn't data.

Pretty Much Exactly That.

Of course, you might want to go further, and ask why this hasn't happened. Why wouldn't some state or locality in the US demand that its teacher-training candidates have a BS in, say, nursing (for primary schoolteachers) or engineering (for highschool math and science) plus an appropriate score on an IQ test like the wonderlic (serving as a sanity check on the required credentials)? They would need these before being hired, even if they had a degree in education.

Then, those teachers could demand higher autonomy (and better wages), and school boards would be inclined to go along. Why aren't parents and the school boards they elect willing or able to do this?

One issue is of course that schools of education in the US are not getting the top cohort of high school graduating classes, and they work with what they get. The young woman (and it is almost all young women) gets a degree, a certificate, and gets to be in charge of your kids for six hours a day, even though when she was in your English class in HS she would copy her answers off of the test of your permanently-stoned buddies.

Who wouldn't want watch her like a hawk?

Next...the union. Some teachers can't teach, but they can for damn sure vote, and pay their union dues to the NEA. The NEA isn't actually opposed to education, but anything that diminishes the political clout of its lobby (no matter how justifiable to parents, students, or even its individual members) will be opposed w/ much firmness.

Finally, there are...legal obstacles. Less said about them, the better...but they do exist.

A few hours of work...on the first day of use.

How many more hours of engrossing touchpad driver jiggerypokery will any person need to do over the course of ownership before the cost of their wasted time adds up to the cost of a macbook?

This. This. THIS.

Federally-backed student loans, undischargeable and given to all and sundry, to be spent wherever on whatever, is a gigantic short in the moral-hazard circuit.

I would throw an actual party for any dictator in the US who would do to the colleges what Henry VIII did to the monasteries.

Kevin's side of the story has been told by him, by Littman in 'The Fugitive Game' and by Eric Corley. Any reasonably broad-minded person who wants to see the law deal evenhandedly with the accused can find places in these accounts to sympathize with Kevin.

'Takedown' is AFAICT the extent of what TS wants to say about the matter. We can presume he comes off in it the way he wanted to come off.

Though I do wonder about the tone of the book, and if John Markoff had more than a little influence on how the story was told, and what details were kept in or left out, and how the persons at the focus of the true-crime narrative being presented were portrayed.

I felt while reading Takedown that maybe, for some reason, there were details being elided that readers interested in a careful piece of investigative journalism might appreciate-especially if they had a deeper understanding of the technology than the mass NYT audience. Maybe someday someone will take that up.