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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • It’s been a while since I learned the history, but if I remecmber right the first schools in the US were religious in nature. But public schooling was generally a huge equalizer, and made the most advances along with workers rights movements, etc.

    That said, there’s plenty to be upset about class-wise, just not the class size thing. It’s true that rich families have always done what they could do to get their kids ahead, generally with private school and tutoring. They have a much higher odds of getting into the better colleges, and the more elite schools tend to lead to higher pay after graduation. They’re also doing everything they can to gut public education, which is the whole point of the push for vouchers (which was especially big during the Trump administration).

    There’s a thousand more reasons to be pissed off at the rich regarding education, but if I wanted to get into every single one I’d still be in academia (My PhD in Ed was all about that). Actually, now that I think of it, take a look at Learning to Labour by Willis, as I think it reflects your train of thought.





  • Your guesswork is doing a bit too much there. Rich schools also have flat classrooms for smaller groups, e.g 30ish.

    The reasons for stadium seating is for size, and that’s true for most schools including community colleges (and even vocational schools). Usually it’s used for classes everyone has to take, like a pre-req. High schools aren’t standardized in the same way, so you generally wouldn’t have a class of 80. High schoolers need more one on one anyway, and teachers require less specialized knowledge, so the numbers just work better that way.



  • Statisticay they are less likely to rape someone, including statutory rape, but it’s always stupid to deal in absolutes. Same is true of mass shootings, domestic violence, etc., it can happen but it’s less likely.

    That said, it’s important to believe rape victims, including those who were raped by women. It’s not just the media in that regard, though, and especially when men are the victim-- it’s especially hard for them to speak out. How many viewers who hear of 16 year old boy being raped by their female teacher and go “nice”? It’s certainly a double standard.


  • If the data is normally distributed (as in bell shaped), the mean and median will be the same. The problem is that the data is probably very skewed, so the median is probably a better representation of the central tendency than the mean. Also, it’s incorrect to say it only represents 2% of people; it’s more that every person is only represented by their position in the set. Quintiles, quartiles, and percentiles work the same way. I like to think of it as everyone being a single vote, unweighted by value.

    That said, if you wanted another acceptable alternative, you can also remove all outliers and likely return the curve back to normal. The problem there is you’d probably be removing every immigrant, so you wouldn’t be representing all Americans. Pros and cons, but given medians are almost only used to describe data and not analyze it, since it’s not compatable with a lot of statistics. A real analyst would probably just dummy code immigration in a regression and provide coefficients for both groups, anyway.




  • I heard about this, although the positive news is it’s mostly people who weren’t in the market for an EV to begin with so it doesn’t really impact EV sales or anything. Still hate to see disinformation win, though.

    I’m a bit sad to hear Congress is more or less outlawing Chinese cars here, though. Affordable EVs are far and few between and it really feels like the national security rational they’re giving thinly hides the real reason of preventing competition for US car makers, as if they even planned on making a decent EV.






  • I’m not even sure if the electorate is in a place to address issues in education and healthcare, haha. But unfortunately I agree; I think Dems are right because it’s clear other nations don’t have this problem (even with their same unhappy societies) but making only incremental gains with gun control shows that it can’t be done right now.

    But I wouldn’t necessarily go with root causes as first priority. If they could fix election issues like gerrymandering and the electrical college, urban centers would have a fair say and might push harder on gun regulation when voices are heard on equal level. If I had a majority, that’s what I’d hit first to make the rest easier.