> Guess who sits on the school boards?

People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.

My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.

In my experience school boards are anything but democratic. The only people that heartfully pursue those positions are the handful of assholes that shouldn't be in those positions for any reason. And their election is just a choose your flavor of asshole that can manage a half decent public persona and is sitting on excess capital to blow on marketing. Nobody knows who these people are, even in small towns with life long residency, half the people on the board nobody knows unless they are also on the school board and met them through it. Even if people cared about their board's membership, how do you realistically vet them all without having shit tons of free time to go personally meet them or follow them around?

This is a new phenomena. It took over a decade for my school district to ban phones. Eventually parents relented - but for the longest time they were the single blocker. Oh, what about emergencies???

Well Nancy, it's not 1995 anymore. Phones aren't for phone calls, we all know that. The school has phones too, you know.

I see this troll response all the time stating families don't want "poors" as some kind of attempt at manipulation to feel I am a bad person.

I [given the chance] would also vote against apartments in my particular neighborhood, and it has nothing to do with being poor at all.

Saying it's about poor people is the polite version, unfortunately

Nope, you are wrong. But I'm sure you feel confident that you're right. Hope that works out for you.

It's about it lowering the value of surrounding property, which is just "oh no poors" but roundabout.

But it's not your fault, it's a systemic issue. The fact you even care about your property value is the problem, not the fact you have to care about it. That's not your fault, you're just playing the game you have to play like everyone else.

Not directly, no it's not about lowering of property value. It's also not your fault that you make assumptions about how other people make decisions without critical thinking.

Unfortunately I am forced to make assumptions when people choose not to tell me their intentions. I actually gave you the benefit of the doubt - I couldve assumed the reason was much worse, which is frankly probably the case since you refuse to say it.

If you don't want to be on the defensive, try to make your position comprehensible.

Uh. 25% support military intervention in China? Which would, with high probability, escalate into a nuclear war? I guess this tells us how many of the polled Trump voters are totally out of their gourds.

I guess (it's just a guess, not an analysis) there's no real chance of the USA winning a war against China. China has a larger population, meaning they will have far greater human resources available to mobilize for war, whether to fight at the front lines or to produce weapons and military equipment.

With the current economic integration and direction of flows, the US can't afford to seriously damage China for the same reason it can't afford to seriously damage the EU.

Even just ceasing trade with the US would be catastrophic (for everyone, but specifically for the US) right now.

If there is no occupation of mainland soil it needn't turn nuclear. And it's not like the US or its regional allies have any interest in occupying PRC land.

I don't think that whether or not the US has an interest in occupation is a large factor in this risk. If the US attacked China, China would respond, guaranteed. That would lead to a full-on war. Unless the US backed down, a nuclear attack by one side or another doesn't seem unlikely enough.

Where is this "full-on war" taking place? You're describing an escalation to nuclear war in the most imprecise terms.

I recall recent polls also showed that around 30% of Republicans would support Trump even if he was directly implicated in the Epstein files, and (in a separate poll) would also support abolishing free elections.

So yeah. Your conclusion seems to be correct.

Wow. When I saw the headline, I thought this would be a generous donation so that Olympians wouldn't need to work day jobs to make ends meet, allowing them to focus on training. But... nope...

The thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.

They get it from senior management, and pass it down like generational trauma. This was a problem even in 2013 when I worked there. Once, I was new and actually pushed back against a Director level person's poor behavior in a 70 person meeting, because I didn't know better. I was approached by multiple individuals afterwards telling me how "brave" it was of me.

At Amazon, unkind and downright unprofessional behavior by people higher up the chain is normalized, and has been for a very long time.

shit runs downhill

There’s a reason Bezos decided to bulk up. Gonna need some of that when people decide to throw hands at all hands.

Some people might take your comment as a joke or exaggeration, but I can confidently say that the worst coworkers I've had by far were all ex-Amazon.

I've never worked directly for Amazon, but for a consultancy that was an AWS Partner.

I got an invite to a team skip level meeting once, and holy shit I could not believe the asshole and bullshit crap those seniors were tossing at each other, at the Partner manager, and also us.

The lesson you learn is that screaming is a one-way street, can be done only in one direction of the org chart.

A junior engineer embarrassing a senior principal is a big no no.

Asserting your dominance is part of the leadership /s

"Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" coming from Amazon leadership is maybe best understood as a joke. Amazon is a meat grinder, even more so since the big tech layoffs started.

(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)

I had lunch with the Amazon leader most responsible for ensuring all staff in the fast-moving-cardboard half of the company had health insurance from day one of employment, no waiting time. Of a decades long career, that was the one thing I saw most animate her—care for fellow humans.

When the 90th percentile employee has a GED and works warehouse or delivery, actions to earn “best employer” may be invisible or worse to the 5% who are software people. I’ve worked at Meta too, and Meta absolutely had better coffee. And WAY better health insurance. But Amazon’s health insurance is uniform for all staff, and that means something.

In many ways they are the best employer, just for shareholders and not employees.

In Seattle there are some developers who call Amazon employees AmHoles. It's part their general arrogance, punctuated by things like their tendency to walk down the sidewalk four abreast and not notice that they are pushing people going the other way out of their way.

I worked a short contract there and I've seen the 'meatgrinder' bit. I joked (not really joking) with my fellow contractors that maybe the reason they walk four abreast is shell-shock, not arrogance. A couple days a week we went to lunch in a daze.

It's clear there's not enough quality control in their 'culture', by almost an order of magnitude. I've known two different people who quit after less than 2 weeks. One after being called on Sunday asking why he wasn't at work. On his second fucking week at the company.

Kind of amazing the author just takes everything at face value and doesn't even consider the possibility that there's a hidden layer of instructions. Elon likes to meddle with Grok whenever the mood strikes him, leading to Grok's sudden interest in Nazi topics such as South African "white genocide" and calling itself MechaHitler. Pretty sure that stuff is not in the instructions Grok will tell the user about.

The "MechaHitler" things is particularly obvious in my opinion, it aligns so closely to Musk's weird trying-to-be-funny thing that he does.

There's basically no way an LLM would come up with a name for itself that it consistently uses unless it's extensively referred to by that name in the training data (which is almost definitely not the case here for public data since I doubt anyone on Earth has ever referred to Grok as "MechaHitler" prior to now) or it's added in some kind of extra system prompt. The name seems very obviously intentional.

Most LLMs, even pretty small ones, easily come up with creative names like that, depending on the prompt/conversation route.

Grok was just repeating and expanding on things. Someone either said MechaHitler or mentioned Wolfenstein. If Grok searches Yandex and X, he's going to get quite a lot of crazy ideas. Someone tricked him with a fake article of a woman with a Jewish name saying bad things about flood victims.

Of course they are. The interesting thing isn't how good LLMs are today, it's their astonishing rate of improvement. LLMs are a lot better than they were a year ago, and light years ahead of where they were two years ago. Where will they be in five years?

Reminds me of the 90s when computer hardware moved so fast. I wonder where the limit is this time around.

What's to stop ICE from declaring anybody they don't like an alien and rendering them to the Salvadoran prison? We already know they're inventing false pretenses to classify people as gang members. There is no functional oversight of what they're doing.

> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow.

We don't know the identities of, or even how many people have been extrajudicially rendered to the Salvadoran prison. The administration claims they're not citizens, but how would we know?

Uh oh. I use em dashes all the time in writing. Am I an AI?