Guaranteed a bunch of ex-girlfriends are getting extra double stalked.

DM: “You enter a room. There are three dead bodies lined up along the wall, each with a mysterious sigal etched into their foreheads. Also, you see a clown.”

Player 1: “I sense motive on the clown.”

Player 2: “I talk to the clown.”

Player 3: “Omg, my parents were killed by clowns. I wrote the DM 300 pages of fiction about it. I draw my sword and prepare to fight!”

DM: “Damn, why aren’t these players interested in my clues?”

Can’t believe another anti-vax guy was killed by a preventable and treatable condition. Prostate cancer is one of the more survivable forms of cancer (10-year relative survival rate of 98% with proper treatment). I wonder if he did the fruit juice enemas like Steve Jobs or he just tried to Straight Edge his way through it, because he didn’t want to live with Low T.

Plenty of ideas. But if I said “provide public housing” and “guarantee jobs for everyone over the age of 16”, you’d angrily rebut that this doesn’t give you someone to call when you feel scared.

These are complex views of society aimed at alleviating criminal incidents, not simple hotlines you can dial to SWAT your neighbors.

I probably read 500 pages a week on average.

Pride and Prejudice alone is 400 pages. Crime and Punishment is another 600 pages. If you have two Lit classes in the same semester, you’re going to have to double that rate or fall behind schedule. Nevermind retention.

I remember sitting in a library surrounded by books, struggling to solve the 15 problems a class Engineering Physics assigned. Just a fist full of brain-teasers day in and day out. Three of us working together managed to clear the load in a couple of hours. Then on to the next assignment, which was another two or three hours. Five classes a day, you’re lucky when you have enough time to sleep.

I’ll admit, I did a few summers at a community college and that workload was much smaller, the tests were far easier, and the graders significantly more forgiving. Crazy how little work it takes to ace an exam in High School Plus relative to a University weed-out program.

Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I’ve explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the “Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?” toggles.

You make it too complicated.

It’s not a simple situation.

For me the question is simple. I get assaulted and robbed, who can I turn investigate and capture the perpetrators?

Ask Renee Good. Hell, ask Trina Martin

The plaintiffs – Trina Martin, her teenage son Gabe, and ex-partner Toi Cliatt – have spent seven years seeking to sue the FBI for damages after agents mistakenly raided their Atlanta home in 2017.

You want a simple, straight, obvious answer. So you create a goon squad with seemingly unlimited power and an endless budget. And now that goon squad is running around town savaging people like a pack of rabid dogs.

So who do you call to investigate and capture the perpetrators you created to investigate and capture the prior iteration of perpetrators?

Teachers are using AI to grade essays. But some experts are raising ethical concerns

We pretend to study and they pretend to grade us.

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.

Before abolishing the police slavery you need to have an idea of what is going to replace it.

Sorry, kids. You’re trapped in a perpetual system of violence, squalor, and death until you can convince the People In Power that they’ll still be landed aristocrats under a reformed system.

I also wonder if they mean, abolish the current police force, or the concept of a police force.

What you have is a state-sanctioned cartel inflicting violence at an industrial scale. If your question is “Who will I call to report an infringement to my property/safety without the police?” I might counter with “How much help did you think the Compton Executioners intended to provide?”

Members of the Executioners are drawn from deputies who work at the Compton station of the LASD. Knock LA has reported that the gang consists of around 80 members. Potential recruits are chosen based on past acts of violence against members of the Compton community and recruits cannot be Black or female.

So, I lob the question back at you. Are we talking about abolishing this particular sheriff’s deputy gang or the concept of shariff’s deputy gangs? Until I get a convincing and comprehensive answer sufficient to satisfy LA’s billionaire class, sheriff’s deputies should be free to rob, rape, and murder Compton residents to their heart’s content.

Anyone remember what it took to abolish slavery?

I would sooner download a tire fire.

College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different.

I love Vibes Based Reporting.

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

As someone who was in college twenty years ago, I’ve got to say there’s no way in hell I could make it through an entire novel in a week while balancing the rest of my course load. Either I’m reading the Cliff’s Notes or I’m not getting it done. I also ran a 15-hour course study in hopes of landing a triple major in four years (bad idea, kids!), but even with a more conservative 12-hour load, imagine this plus 3 other classes making the same demands on your time.

This isn’t a new problem. It is, perhaps, a problem that the current generation of students no longer has the cheat-codes to navigate. But doggedly insisting people were housing a 400-page book in a week and retaining it for meaningful discussion? Get fucked, dude. Nobody was actually doing that ever.

If you could come to the table talking about these novels, its because you already read them in High School, not because you consumed them in a week in your hectic freshman year.

Feel like I need brain training.

That’s just called “practice”. And I’ll say its easier to find when its already part of your day to day job activities. If you’re reading and writing with other collegiate professionals at a collegiate level, you’ll maintain your skills. Otherwise, you tend to sink to the common denominator.

I don’t even think that’s bad per say, either. I wouldn’t expect a college athlete to maintain the skills of a 25 year old who trains 4 hours a day if they took up a desk job for ten years. The fixation on having Genius Level Skills at everything overlooks the cost-benefit of maintaining those skills when you have nothing to apply them to.

The idea that the US population would somehow be better off if everyone read at a 12th grade level really begs the question “What are you doing with 12th grade reading/writing skills that would improve your life?” And none of these articles seem to have an answer to that question. It’s just intrinsically better because 12 > 6.

Would your life be better if you could bench press 400 lbs rather than 200 lbs? Would it be better if you could do trigonometry in your head? Recite the Hamlet soliloquy by heart in the original Ye Olde English? I guess, maybe on the margins. But Idk how much of my life I can spare to achieve any one of these. And I don’t know if what I’d give up to achieve them would be better on balance.

I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school’s over. Atrophy of the brain.

You move from an environment that’s constantly challenging and stressing your brain muscles to an environment that asks you to do the same repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. I think the most glaring example of this is the recent tendency towards “Vibes Coding”.

How AI Vibe Coding Is Erasing Developers’ Skills

One developer on Hacker News mentioned this perfectly: “For a while, I barely bothered to check what Claude was doing because the code it generated tended to work on the first try. But now I realize I’ve stopped understanding my own codebase.”

This is the trap. The AI works so well initially that you stop paying attention. You stop learning. You stop thinking. And by the time you realize what’s happened, your skills have already degraded significantly.

And since most of the US syndicated news publications and entertainment fiction deliberately publish at a 6th grade level… that’s the level people tend to operate at for the rest of their adult lives.

Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world.

I mean, 6th grade reading is literate. It’s not as though 6th graders can’t read. They just don’t have the advanced language skills you’d need to survive a college course on Proust or whatever.

Goes a bit farther than that. I have a family friend who struggles to read the menus at restaurants. But she’s also desperately poor, a high school drop out, and regularly between jobs in a service sector that’s totally unforgiving to people in her position.

I do think there’s a reinforcing cycle of “Everything is written at the 6th grade level” -> “Everyone communicates at the 6th grade level”. But I also don’t think these articles do a good job of defining the difference between a 4th grade, 8th grade, 12th grade, collegiate level. So when you see this statistic, its not entirely clear what the problem is, per say. Like, what isn’t being communicated beyond 6th grade literacy levels that people need?

Per the article:

Here’s the ugly truth nobody wants to admit: a barely literate population is a controllable population.

Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.

…

Mental health outcomes are catastrophic. Depression rates have skyrocketed. Anxiety disorders are endemic. Suicide rates have surged, particularly among young people who inherit this deteriorating nightmare and see no viable future.

…

The economic cost of illiteracy alone is staggering — research shows that raising every American adult to sixth-grade reading level would generate an additional $2.2 trillion annually.

Few citations, lots of big claims and speculative statements, the tendency to catastrophize (and inject implicit nostalgia) as though 6th grade literacy trends are a shocking new development rather than the historical baseline.

None of it really translates into actionable policy. All it seems to do is feed the prevailing Everyone is Stupid Except Me self-aggrandizing outlook. I tend to see these articles paired with the inevitable reactionary “We should impose literacy tests on voting” and “Would have this problem if not for all the damned rednecks / illegals / minorities / <insert reviled social group here>” outlooks.

Everything published at or below 6th grade reading level

Americans consume this content almost exclusively

The median reader consumes at or below the 6th grade level

I think the better question is why a woman with movie star charm would put up with someone who thought she was an idiot.

Seems like the relationship is doomed from the start if providing a simple response to an easy question antagonizes you.