> The main purpose of "problems", and especially of homework, was a show of social submission, designed to persuade the teachers to reveal the next secret.
Of all the weird misunderstandings kids have about the world, this might be the weirdest I've ever heard.
I'm kinda fascinated, do you recall at what age you believed this? What was the context you grew up in (country, culture, school). Do you recall where the seed of this idea got planted?
Hard to say exactly, but I'd guess ages 11 to 16. UK, boys' grammar school (selective state school). When you're not aware of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve it's the most obvious explanation for how education works. I made the common assumption that quality of education is measured by exam scores, and the most effective method of passing exams is obviously cramming. And if cramming is the best method of learning, it must be possible to learn an entire syllabus in a single day, so the teachers must be intentionally limiting you.
I feel this is the most traditional and natural model of education. It's like medieval guilds, where you had literal secrets that would be revealed only after sufficient demonstration of loyalty.
Have you seen what life in Tokyo looks like for the average person today? The size of apartments, the crowds on subways, etc.
People's quality of life would be far better if the population density were lower.
I'd much rather have a world with a steady or shrinking number of people and a rising quality of life, than a world with an exponentially growing population and declining quality of life.
I admit my comment was fairly dramatic, but your comment is sort of what i'm talking about. A specific city is crowded so your solution is to just get rid of the humans? the humans are the whole point! I will admit though my comment is mostly motivated by emotions, i get really bad vibes from people who want fewer humans on earth. Probably letting those vibes cloud my judgement
With all due respect, there is a Japan outside of Tokyo, you know. Japan does not have a problem with population density, Tokyo does, and there are reasons for it.
Your experience doesn't match mine for US. Either SF is unique (almost certainly true) or the specialists they're referencing are extremely in demand for specific conditions.
With my regular PPO health insurance from my employer, I've had no trouble getting appointments with various specialists over the years. Occasionally I call one place and get told they can't see me for 2 months, so I just call the second name on the list and get an appointment sooner.
Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.
It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.
Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.
Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.
I guess folks have different definitions of the words?
To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
If you've ever been a parent, regardless of whether you think spanking is OK, you know that there is a huge difference between these two activities. I personally avoid physical discipline myself, but I can understand a parent who decides to give their kid a spank on the rump after the child did something where they didn't understand how seriously negative the implications were.
For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny? I can see why someone would think that the short – but sharp – pain of a quick spank is more effective at protecting the child's short and long term health.
The trouble is, you are describing different points on a scale with no clear boundary. As anyone into BDSM can tell you, an open handed slap on a bare buttocks is quite capable of inflicting severe pain - and therefore, psychological trauma. Imagine being made to wait for the spank, in a vulnerable and humiliating position. Imagine if it were accompanied by mind games. In short, imagine what a sadist hell bent on inflicting trauma on a child could do if you permitted them to strike their victim, provided they left no permanent marks.
It is true that a malicious parent is capable of mentally damaging their child without recourse to violence, but it does not follow from that that we should shrug and permit it. Violence is an overwhelming force multiplier in an abuser's toolkit, and also strictly unnecessary for good parenting.
To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.
And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.
> it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue
Exactly, which is why I myself choose to play it safe.
But it's kinda like the, "No evidence that parachutes save lives" thing, where because you don't have a double-blind randomized controlled study, we have to end up relying on our intuition.
And – unlike with parachutes – everyone has a different intuition as to whether spanking is actually going to result in trauma. Lots of, "I'll never hit my child" going up against, "I was spanked as a child and I'm just fine" so its all back to personal judgment.
My oldest son once accidentally ran out in traffic, and he was practically traumatised just by the way I shouted "stop!" at him. He never did it again.
I think by using violence, the main thing you teach kids is that using violence is an option. I prefer to discourage violence. I'm not saying I never grabbed or held them a bit too roughly, but I think they learn a lot more from me talking to them and explaining why it's wrong, than from pain.
> When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool
I see people talk about belts far too often. I would consider that immediate grounds for losing custody over your child.
> For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny?
I'm glad that you brought up this example because it's the one context in which I think spanking can be acceptable (needing to shock a child from something they were about to do that could have endangered themselves or others). I'm not a parent and not sure I wouldn't try to find some other approach but I can see the strength of the argument here (where I can't see it for other uses of corporal punishment of children).
No one should be shocked that a gimmicky reality TV show that had 600lb contestants with lifelong eating disorders shed weight incredibly rapidly while living in a house for a month with fellow contestants didn't provide long term solutions to their underlying mental health and food addiction issues.
The biggest loser was the equivalent of turning drug rehab into a gameshow and putting it on TV.
It's maybe interesting in the context of addictions and disordered eating habits, but not really relevant for general weight loss, weight management or physical health for most people.
I once read a comment from an expert in that field who said that it was essentially impossible to prevent contamination, and that they had to constantly test and then shut down and sanitize when they discovered a different species of algae in their system.
How do you mitigate that issue? (And good news if you have a solution, that same person said they figured whoever solved that problem would be the world's first trillionaire).
Mitigation strategies are varied, you basically cannot guarantee there will not be any contamination if you are doing any kind of scale. We are looking at polycultures/consortiums (robust ecosystems inside one reactor), various filtration systems and high frequency monitoring. There are some others we won't publish (yet)
Doesn't the service provider (AT&T or whoever) have a copy of the messages they could subpoena?
It seems shocking to me that deleting the messages off the phones makes them inaccessible to prosecution, when presumably there are backups on multiple servers controlled by telecom companies and other government entities.
All TelCos in all countries have backup of the SMS messages. The key part is for how long and what details.
In the US, for example AT&T is only a couple of days; Verizon, 3-10 days for SMS contents. Everything else like subscriber info, call history, tower location, tower dumps, range-to-tower can be years.
It makes no sense that a telcom would be 'backing up' your SMS (or maybe not even SMS -- could all be iMessage which the telcom doesn't see) texts. What reason would they have to do so? Where's the business value of storing all of that data, supporting the infrastructure, supporting restore requests from customers?
There’s a difference between police investigations and civil/normal entities.
The key thing is to have a policy or practice. If your policy is to purge texts after 7 days, that’s a defensible position. If your behavior is to throw your phone in the river around the time of your communicating about a matter of interest to a litigant, that reflects poorly.
I don't think they keep them for very long. I know that my organization looked at purchasing Smarsh, which hooks in to the API that providers present so that Smarsh can do it's archiving. IIRC, there was a short time limit (not a whole lot of days) on being able to retrieve the messages from the providers.
Also, if I'm a provider, keeping all those text messages is going to be a more of a liability than a benefit. It's an expense for storage and retrieval. I'm not sure they would really make any money off of maintaining a long history; it would be super rare that this would pay off. Better to just state that "after n days, they are gone, we're done. Archiving is up to you, the customer."
I might actually see the value in opting into this, especially if they provide a service where they can notarize SMS message logs. Someone says you texted them something inappropriate, or harassing, and you can grab the logs and expose them to be either mistaken or dishonest.
> The earliest known usage was by the American author Charles Astor Bristed, in a letter to the editor published in The New York Times on January 11, 1863.
> The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which posits that the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule.
> the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule.
Who popularized it is subjective.
What isn't subjective: the CIA indeed sent out a memo about this. It marked an increase in the use of the term in popular media publications. You can find it and read it.
AT&T is almost certainly not storing every text message long-term. The NSA likely is. It wouldn't be surprising if that's via a direct PRISM-style integration, but it still means subpoenaing AT&T for old texts is likely to not be productive. (As it was not productive in this particular case.)
Subpoena the NSA and they'll say "no, for national security reasons".
I'm not even sure we can extrapolate that the NSA is storing anything like every text message long-term (as opposed to metadata, or samples, or the full transcripts of individuals targeted for investigation, or a machine learning trained weights set to flag messages that indicate someone should go on the targeted-for-investigation list).
6 billion text messages are sent per day in the US. That's about the volume of Google web searches, and I know from experience Google doesn't have the capacity to log every search or the logs of evaluation of every search. If Google lacks the capacity, I suspect the NSA lacks the capacity.
Google absolutely does have the capacity to log every search query, and does - and I say this as someone who has worked with that dataset, if only for training purposes.
6 billion SMS messages, at a max length of 160 characters, is 1 terrabyte of raw text. I think that the NSA has the cash to shell out $100 for a new 1TB hard drive every day... (not even including compression, of which it is highly, highly compressible)
The only tool that I know of that can encrypt SMS messages is Silence. The source code is quite stale.
The fifth amendment allows an individual to refuse to disclose a password in criminal trials (they can be compelled to open biometric locks, hwoever). I don't know if these protections would extend to civil proceedings such as occurred here; if not, the judge could hold such witnesses in contempt.
Lockdowns or not, nobody could've avoided getting covid in the long term. It's just too contagious. The only way out is letting it run through the population and mutate. Flattening the curve might alleviate strain on the medical system but it also prolongs the time to benign mutations.
You could just as well claim the Democrats are far left and the republicans center left.