Wonderdonkey's comments

On a little bit of a tangent, this article made me think about how far we've come in terms of air quality in Southern California. We can and should always do better. But in my high school years, we had up to 160 hazardous/very unhealthy air days in a year, and up to 305 mildly unhealthy to very unhealthy days that same year (1981). For comparison, in 2022, we had one hazardous/very unhealthy day, and fewer than 10 every year from 2007 on, with the exception of 2020. That actually inspires me when we see actual results from the efforts.

Look up images of LA pollution in the 1970s and 1980s. It was madness. And even with that obvious, visible soup we called air back then, there was extreme resistance to anti-pollution measures.

Reference: air quality index by year: http://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php

Cheating is such a fluid concept anyway, and it's inconsistently applied. Some schools will suspend students for using calculators on a math test; some force students to bring calculators to their tests. Some give out the questions before a test, while others expel students for distributing test questions. Some require students to collaborate or use online sources; some forbid it. It's arbitrary.

Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style academic testing, which is debatable.

What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want?

I'd also add this: The internet is developing quickly into a literal extension of the human mind. I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn information versus to find information.

Same question here.

Yes! That's great to hear!

I remember a bunch of "X is evil" sites sprouted up at some point. There was even a site that aggregated them.

I did mine when my wife was pregnant with our first daughter back in '96. I had quit smoking cigarettes, and this was one of my outlets. It would be cool if someone could produce an accurate timeline of all the AOL, Geocities, etc. sites. Too bad we only have incomplete snapshots! I wouldn't even now how to start something like that.

Easily 9.9 out of 10 people won't get sardonicism. My contribution was the Evil of Pippi Longstocking site, which aimed to prove that Pippi Longstocking is the devil. (Anybody remember the '90s?)

The Daily Show, which thought I was serious, invited me to do an interview with Mo Rocca. (They were disappointed to learn the site was a joke.)

I earned a headline in Sweden, and in the story Astrid Lindgren lamented being misunderstood (ha!).

The hate mail (and some fan mail) from Sweden was precious. I later added a section on the site called "Swedemail." You'd think that would tip people off, but nope.

Anyhoo, AOL took it down eventually. But it's still on archive.org, thankfully. Here's a later snapshot with the Swedemail section (complete with Barnes & Noble affiliate ads!) if anyone's interested. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol...

White type on black background made my eyes disobey my wish to have functioning vision for about three minutes after I clicked away.

Side topic: As an end user, the worst for me software that only tells you what's wrong with your password AFTER you've done it wrong, and then only tells you one thing at a time even when you've made multiple errors (dictionary word, password too short, needs one capital letter, needs one number...). Just tell me the damn rules and let me get on with my life!

The trouble is the only thing our state and cities ever do is widen freeways, and that never works. The core of the problem is traffic management, which technology can solve without added tolls. (It's the same with city streets. There is absolutely no reason in 2017 why we should ever hit more than one or two red lights in intra-city travel.) It's just that the state and city governments seeem truly oblivious to any new ways of thinking about the problem.

Tolls are regressive and will have a greater impact on poor people who have to commute to work. Second, public infrastructure is paid for by by both taxes and use fees/licenses/fines. That's a bit different from a utility. If the feds and state gave me back the money for the roads I've already built, I'd be fine switching to a pay-as-you-go model. Another consideration: This state is already funneling too many public funds to private toll road operators — to the tune of billions of dollars. I'd really hate to see more of my money go to people who are already charging the public way too much for setting up booths on the roads I paid for and charging me to drive on them.

As a side note, I've always thought California was leaving some big revenue opportunities on the table by not issuing special licenses for high-speed driving and creating high-speed lanes for people with those licenses. It would be a neat experiment. We could try it out on the 15 between LA and Las Vegas, were people are driving 100 anyway.

Freedom of press will easily survive an ephemeron like Trump, maybe even come out stronger for the short-term tribulation. He's superficial.

The more insidious statist leaders create deep, subtle, lasting harm. It's the Bushes and Obamas who set up the largest illegal domestic spying operation ever and got away with it because, even when called out, people trusted them not to commit evil acts with the store of data they were collecting. It was Obama who routinely violated journalists rights yet continued to be generally supported by mainstream news outlets.

That genre of politician will be making a comeback after Trump, and that's when people will start feeling comfortable again and go along with anything that promises stability and safety. And I believe that's the environment where the type of manipulation described in this article ("liberal paternalism") can really thrive.

Both collaborative assignments and assessments of those assignments are often poorly conceptualized in school.

Why, for example, do curriculum developers create (or choose to adopt from textbook publishers) scenarios where if one person fails, everybody in the group suffers? That's not why we collaborate. In fact, that's the opposite of why we collaborate. We don't do it to create multiple points of failure.

It's also a problem with the way we assess and the fact that we almost exclusively conduct summative assessments on these types of projects with high-stakes consequences rather than formative assessments that allow the experience to be used to foster understanding.

I'm a parent (and an education journalist). I see a lot of this. My daughter has had to do the entire work for several "collaborative" projects to maintain her GPA just because the other students wouldn't do the work or wouldn't do it well. That's a common complaint.

Two ideas for getting around that:

1. For the types of assignments where a small group produces a single outcome and shares responsibility for it, assess formatively. If the group does poorly, the teacher sits down with them and gives them supplemental instruction. And, in talking to the students, that teacher can also discover where the weaker students are and focus on them. That way you get assessment with zero high-stakes consequences, and you help advance learning rather than ending it with a letter grade.

2. Assign projects where each student has a job and is evaluated singularly for that job but is allowed to work collaboratively with other students (and the teacher) to complete it. There are all kinds of ways to encourage collaboration in those cases without resorting to punishing others for one person's failure in the end product of a collaborative assignment.

As others have said, there's also the question of assessment itself. Why assess for a grade or points or what have you? There's a movement to do away with grades and test scores. It's working fairly well, but it requires serious dedication from the teacher to ensure that students are learning. Large-scale, that's difficult. We don't have 4 million+ teachers who would be willing to do that extra work.

Side note: The volume on BBC's media player goes to 11.

I had kept my Macs at 10.6 for a long time but had to "upgrade" one of them to help my daughter with an iPhone problem (really annoying that you have to update your Mac just to copy files to a phone, but whatever). Everything was worse. Search was terrible. Mail was in the crapper. The weirdest shock was when I was using Apple apps and discovered they'd changed Shift-Command-S from "Save As" to "Duplicate." That move is really emblematic of Apple's direction with the Mac — arbitrary changes that either eliminate features or make everyday workflow more cumbersome.

I bought my first Mac in 1989. I bought my first non-Mac PC in 2015 and stopped using Mac altogether.

Came here to see if anyone else noticed that and what people made of it. That was the real revelation in this story.

If nothing else, if you followed that one tutorial on running a Tor hidden service using Docker, maybe stop doing that now.

Don't try that with your Surface Pro!

I'd been exclusively with Apple since 1989 when I bought my first Mac (an SE with dual HD floppy drives and a whopping 400 MB external hard drive). I stuck with Apple through the difficult years and then even became the editor of a multi-title Mac publishing operation. Apple loved me so much they gave me a loaded iPod for my birthday one year. I don't know how many people they've done that for, but not many, I'm guessing.

But things started to change with the success of the iPhone and then the iPad. We Mac fanatics used to say that any success for Apple was a win for the Mac platform. But in reality, it hasn't played out that way. The Mac is languishing, and it's languishing in ways that I can only attribute to intent. It's becoming more frustrating to use. Files that you see right in front of you don't come up in a search. Software updates bring rapid obsolescence. Simple things like "Save As" have been changed in Apple's apps so that now Shift-Command-S, for example, is the command to "Duplicate" a file, which you then have to Command-S save. Then when you close out, you have the additional step of dismissing a save dialog on the original document. The hardware, obviously, is not being built to last. (Apple's laptops were always frail things, dating back to my PowerBook Duo and PowerBook 520c, but their desktops and workstations were always bullet-proof; they are not anymore.)

It's a bunch of little things and big things combined to make a very frustrating experience.

This December, I decided to jump ship. I bought a Surface Pro 4. The hardware is awesome (Core i7 with 16 GB RAM). The software needed some manual intervention, but it's coming along. (Microsoft didn't include the WinTab driver, for example, so there was no pressure sensitivity for some apps. And there was no documentation available for it. And frankly Apple's keyboard shortcuts for special characters are better than Microsoft's, but I've been able to emulate those.)

I don't even think about what platform I'm on when I'm working now (except when I use Dreamweaver CS6 because Adobe is freaking horrible and can't deal with Microsoft's trackpad and wants to force me to rent CC, which I will never do).

I never considered an iPad or iPad Pro for a second. They are useless to me. When I get a unit in, it just gathers dust. There's nothing "pro" about it unless your profession is typing e-mails and visiting Web pages. Plus, I actually like computers. I'm old enough that they are still like science fiction to me. I still have dreams about them. And I like to be able to get into the software guts of my computers and mess around in there.

I also refuse to consider the iPhone. Not as long as there are Android phones that have expandable storage and a removable battery. Plus every time I have to deal with one of my kids' iPhones, especially when I have to deal with iTunes on top of that, I want to punch Apple so badly.

And most importantly, I don't want to be at the bottom of the food chain in Apple's iTunes ecosystem. And that's all Apple's customers have become.

It seems to me the most unscrupulous businesses in the United States all do their business by the books. No need to fudge it by failing to declare revenue. They just don't pay taxes, and it's all legal.

Cash businesses here do exist. My mechanic only takes cash, and he's a lot cheaper (and, incidentally, better and more honest with his customers) than other mechanics I've dealt with. I wonder how the IRS deals with that. I know that with people who get tips (waiters, hairdressers, etc.) they assume a certain percentage of income from cash tips.

Paying off small debts first isn't just a "natural tendency." Consumer advice sites actually encourage this as a motivational strategy. Every single one of them.

Having read this, now I question the objectivity of those types of advice pieces.

For example, here's a story on US News that covers three strategies for paying off credit card debt. The first tip is to pay off higher interest cards. But the second is to pay off the smallest debts first and pay the minimum on the other cards. What?!?

http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2014...

This "3 strategies" thing is very widespread, and all of the sites are the same, from bank sites to credit recovery sites to financial reporting in magazines and newspapers. The first that's presented always sounds complicated (calculate bla bla bla). The second strategy is always "pay smallest debt first." Nice and simple. If both are presented as good strategies, which do you choose? The one that requires work, or the one that seems simple?

I used to read these types of advice pieces when I had high debt following a layoff in 2002. I've recovered since then (paid off $65k in debt all at once with a cash out on my house, thus avoiding bankruptcy). And now the No. 1 rule is do not use credit cards to pay for things you can't afford. Use them only as a tool to stay on the grid so that you have a good credit rating so that you get better deals on everything that involves looking up your credit rating. (You'll get a lower price on a car, for example, if you have a better credit rating.) So take out a couple cards; make small purchases; auto-pay on a regular schedule. (Do not change you payment schedule or make extra payments. Some credit reporting agencies lower your score when you do this.)

Came here to recommend this article as well. It's by far the most informative piece I've ever read on ISIS. This should be required reading for every policymaker and military strategist.

This article is for people who haven't yet figured out that different stores sell the same things for different prices. This is the way it's always been. Come for the thing that's cheap/on sale, spend your money on something more expensive while you're there. Basic retail.

Also, you don't need packing tape or the original box to do a return. You go to a UPS or FedEx store, and they handle it for you for free. Or you order shipping supplies from FedEx, and they bring them to you for free and then come and pick up your package from you.

This isn't any harder than returning something to a physical store, and in fact it's still easier in many cases because you don't have to wait in line or answer annoying questions.