Florida officials continued their war on education this week after rejecting more than 50 proposed math textbooks that allegedly “included references to Critical Race Theory.”

The Florida Department of Education announced Friday it would not include 54 of the 132 ― or 41% ― of math textbooks on the state’s adopted list, citing “CRT” as one of the main reasons.

“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the statement said. “The highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies.”

The state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said without evidence that the math textbooks “included indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.”

DeSantis has been an outspoken critic of CRT, which has become a catchall term ― stripped of its original academic meaning ― for having discussions about racism in the classroom. Since last July, there have been more than 200 instances of public school districts in Florida banning books, the third highest number of incidents of any state in the U.S.

Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith said in a tweet that the governor “has turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning.” - https://www.huffpost.com/

Probably for the best. We’ve all seen it….and worse by now. 150000 children kidnapped and taken to Russia for re-education and quick adoption by Russians who lost sons in the war. Why aren’t we giving Ukraine back their nukes if we aren’t keeping the agreement that convinced them to give them up?

If youre a normal country you are always living on credit, if for no other reason, then because it is super easy and cheap to borrow. Also you have to, to make it to the next pay check (tax collection). First your subjects have to produce and sell, then you can collect taxes.

You dont base the value of the dollar on anything. You offer it as a commodity to the market. If your economy sucks or you print too much money the dollar goes down, which can help the economy. Printing money doesnt automatically help the economy though, it just creates space and time to make it possible for the economy to improve.

Improving the economy means creating more or better products and services that are in demand at a competitive cost. Governments in non-dictatorial countries cant really do that directly, they can only create the conditions for this to happen.

Moderate inflation hardly plays a part, except as a moderator (is that a pun?) of shocks. Deflation (and a strong gold standard in a developing economy IS deflation) is deadly, it makes the economy less flexible, less able to adjust.

If you never improve your ecomomy, all you will have left will be to bitch about inflation.

What is too much debt, too much inflation, too much intervention? I wish economics was a science.

Theoretically the economy can get to be so bad that the structure collapses, there are countries which have notoriously bad historical records, and yet every time they restart they have to borrow money to get things going again. Reserves in general are useless. Production, services and a functioning market, recursive production of valuable goods and services which freely and easily find customers is the only thing you can consider a reliable pillar of civilization. Currency is one of those goods and services.

If for any reason yor currency cant freely circulate (see China or the USSR errr... Russia) you can hardly be a superpower, at least not in the economic sense.

Adopting a gold standard so strong that it would destroy the international dollar standard has no advantage for the USofA or for any developed first world country. Even just having the Euro wreaks havoc in weaker European countries economies, but that is another can of worms.

A lot of what is wrong about the gold standard would apply if a country decided to adopt bitcoin as its sole currency btw.

Yeah, the crutch of it for me is the UBI moniker.

What you describe at the end of your post, minimum income, is really just a rewording of the existing social security and welfare systems across the western world. I know they look different in each, but here in Canada what you describe is more or less our already existing system's design goal. Welfare money exists for those that straight up can not work, and an employment insurance system exists to protect those inbetween jobs, meanwhile other multiple programs are aimed at distributing financial assistance to the lower income groups.

Despite all of that already existing, UBI is still being heralded up here in trials as well as a replacement. The problem being that for the needy the UBI pitches are generally a step backwards.

Eg. $500/month is the UBI pitch, and they say it'll be great because everyone gets it no matter what so it's simple and fair and nobody is left behind. The trouble though is that the reality is the truly in need people were already benefitting more than the $500/month under the existing systems, and the cost was much less because it was targeted.

I here UBI and get very worried about folks just selling snake oil 'solutions' that in the end are just a demand to adopt their own particular flavor of wealth redistribution.

At this point I believe Videosift is pranking me. Nicole Smith has somehow risen from the dead, morphed into a tall airline hostess on top of the Burj whatever and of all improbable things possible has adopted my venerable family surname? WTaF? Actually her late ex-husband appears to not be related to our line of Ludviks AFAIK.

Just incase you're afraid of- you know- facing reality

========================================


IQ testing and the eugenics movement in the United States

Eugenics, a set of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior,[39][40][41] played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States during the Progressive Era, from the late 19th century until US involvement in World War II.[42][43]

The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of the British Scientist Sir Francis Galton. In 1883, Galton first used the word eugenics to describe the biological improvement of human genes and the concept of being "well-born".[44][45] He believed that differences in a person's ability were acquired primarily through genetics and that eugenics could be implemented through selective breeding in order for the human race to improve in its overall quality, therefore allowing for humans to direct their own evolution.[46]

Goddard was a eugenicist. In 1908, he published his own version, The Binet and Simon Test of Intellectual Capacity, and cordially promoted the test. He quickly extended the use of the scale to the public schools (1913), to immigration (Ellis Island, 1914) and to a court of law (1914).[47]

Unlike Galton, who promoted eugenics through selective breeding for positive traits, Goddard went with the US eugenics movement to eliminate "undesirable" traits.[48] Goddard used the term "feeble-minded" to refer to people who did not perform well on the test. He argued that "feeble-mindedness" was caused by heredity, and thus feeble-minded people should be prevented from giving birth, either by institutional isolation or sterilization surgeries.[47] At first, sterilization targeted the disabled, but was later extended to poor people. Goddard's intelligence test was endorsed by the eugenicists to push for laws for forced sterilization. Different states adopted the sterilization laws at different paces. These laws, whose constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in their 1927 ruling Buck v. Bell, forced over 60,000 people to go through sterilization in the United States.[49]

California's sterilization program was so effective that the Nazis turned to the government for advice on how to prevent the birth of the "unfit".[50] While the US eugenics movement lost much of its momentum in the 1940s in view of the horrors of Nazi Germany, advocates of eugenics (including Nazi geneticist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer) continued to work and promote their ideas in the United States.[50] In later decades, some eugenic principles have made a resurgence as a voluntary means of selective reproduction, with some calling them "new eugenics".[51] As it becomes possible to test for and correlate genes with IQ (and its proxies),[52] ethicists and embryonic genetic testing companies are attempting to understand the ways in which the technology can be ethically deployed.[53]

Locally, all the beef in my area is grass fed. All unnatural pastures were created as a byproduct of the logging industry, not for cattle. It’s butchered and stays local. I must guess our beef here is that outlier at 9 kg CO2 equivalent per kg….or better.
I also must assume they give no value to the rest of the carcass in their calculations…bone meal, tallow, etc are also valuable commodities not accounted for here.

The biggest issue with food production is the number of mouths to feed. We about 8 billion today and rising. The maximum number that can be supported is estimated to be between 8 and 10 billion, but the maximum that can be sustained naturally without depletion of essential resources is only 1.5 billion, assuming they use the same resources per capita.
To actually be sustainable as a species, we need to eliminate over 80% of the population AND adopt far less destructive behaviors.
Ain’t gonna happen. Start making your chain mail dresses and shoulder pads now, it’s almost time for Thunderdome.

I think the worst part of these summits is their stated goals.
Paris intended to keep warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050 (no real plan beyond then)…but you might recall, 1.5 degrees of warming is considered the tipping point where feedback loops and natural processes outpace human inputs, meaning even if we hit zero emissions by 2050, and if everyone kept to their Paris agreement promises, and if other nations don’t continue to ramp up emissions, and if unforeseen feedback loops aren’t stronger or faster acting than predicted, we still lose control completely by 2050. That’s the best plan we have, runaway climate shifts in <30 years AT BEST….and no one seems to be living up to even that planned disaster of a plan. Emissions aren’t being cut, they’re increasing. Feedback loops are ramping up 40 years earlier than predicted. All the while, people are complaining that gas is over $3 (I haven’t seen it under $4 in decades where I live) and insisting we adopt some heavily polluting power generation instead of investing in green energy solutions. People assume, it seems, that some last minute fix will solve climate change, ignoring the fact that emissions from today are reactive in the atmosphere for between 25 and 150 years, so we needed to be at net zero 25 years ago to even start effecting the atmosphere today…and some emissions from the industrial revolution are still effecting us now. Net zero by 2050 (a pipe dream, and the best plan so far) is planning to fail completely…like turning off the blast furnace in your house when the thermometer hits 450.5 inside and thinking you can stop it from burning down.
If Covid taught us anything, it’s that there is 0% chance humans will be able to cooperate enough to tackle climate change. People were asked to simply wear a mask and distance a bit to save their lives, and enough refused to do it that the methods that worked beautifully elsewhere failed miserably to control a virus. If we can’t pull off such a simple, blatantly obvious plan against a virus, what chance is there of cooperation across the board to sacrifice enormous amounts of money and completely revamp our wasteful way of life in uncountable ways to stop something seen as a future problem by many? IMO, there so little chance of pulling it off that it’s statistically correct to say there’s absolutely no chance at all.

Still catering to the early adopters.

For me an electric car is twice what I can afford with half the performance of what I have. I drive more than 300 km far at least twice a week, sometimes in winter, in an already heavy van loaded with equipment. Keep trying, Tesla.

I do expect progress, but I will believe it when I see it IRL not in a fancy video.

They're not "illegal immigrants" if they're refugees. Refugees are leaving another country seeing refuge because they are in danger. It's a legal (hence, not illegal) policy adopted by the united states post WWII because we decided after the fact that we didnt take in enough jewish refugees seeking asylum before the holocaust.

Simply calling these people illegal flies in the face of US law. You, sir, are being anti-American when you falsely claim something is illegal when that is simply not the case.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1225#b



And how exactly is it Biden's fault that there was a crazy hurricane that hit Haiti following a deadly attack on their president?

Hee Hee.

It's just good fun. You pretend to know facts, so why not fight mud with mud?

Look, you're answer is no answer. Calling it murder makes you look unconscionably devoid. It has no merit. Also is an insult to the whole matter.

If life - other people's unformed, potential children - matter that much...then why not support Democrats?

They are the only ones seriously taking about national healthcare. NO GOP PLAN - isn't that true?

If you w/the holy staff, want children to be carried to full term, then prenatal care is a necessity. Data shows that the bulk of terminations are single parents with children. As a citizen of the USA, you KNOW that's tough enough. But no guy, no religious fart, that talks about "personal responsibility" yet offers no aid is sewer fodder.

Even adoption is a lie. Poll anyone at your church (if you do that sort of thing and are not independently enlightened) how many have adopted, bet it's not that much...if any.

It's a hard sell, amigo.

But do know there are foreseeable unintended deaths coming because of this bill if left in place - GO DOJ!!! Blissful Bob and his ilk will claim it did no such thing either.

Mean you no ill will (the devil you say) but your intent isn't being served by this notion that banning means solving.

[BTW: do you remember when the state of FL and Jeb Bush lost ~10,000 children in the foster care system? Sometime later he glowingly said they accounted for 99% of them? Meaning 100 kids could have been sex slaves, dead, or dating Matt Gaetz.]

So mothers who adopt children don't count?

Not all those who give birth are mothers, not all mothers have given birth. How is that hard to grasp?
Has he never heard of surrogates?
Does he not understand adoption?

You can't kill a living human being...

Death Penalty exists...

Abortion will always be a touchy subject, but if you have money to travel, you can get that abortion in places that support them. So what these abortion laws do is punish poor people who can't make that trip. Then those same people are forced to either put the child up for adoption (because we don't have a ton of children that can't be adopted already) or they can raise that child, most likely in the same situation that led to them being poor and not having a proper family unit.

Storytime, and god help me if my wife ever finds out I talked about this.

I was raised in a poor home, with an abusive family. My wife was raised in a poor home with a good family. When we started dating after High School back in 1992, you had two choices for safe sex, condoms or birth control (doctor visit with no insurance and it was Texas in 1992, they weren't just tossing it out like free candy). We had to use condoms because we couldn't afford birth control and because she was scared of using it. If you have ever read the side effects, you might be too, seeing as death can be one of them in rare instances.

So condoms were the watchword. But accidents happen; maybe one just didn't work right, maybe it was the one that broke one time, but we ended up getting pregnant. I told her that I would do whatever she wanted. We planned to marry soon anyway, so I said we could shotgun it if need be. She said she didn't think she wanted a child. So I said that it was HER decision, but I would be there through it.

It isn't easy. Unless you have been in that exact situation, you will never know the fear and uncertainty involved. We were 18 and 20, just starting out with shit jobs, living with parents, and with a 1968 Catalina as our only vehicle. Her parents would have forced her to have it if they knew, because they thought the same way as @bobknight33. We would have been stuck living with them, they already didn't like me because I wasn't deeply religious and not into ranch life. My parents wouldn't have taken us in because my mom didn't like my wife until years later. The stress and anger would have probably split us up, and both of us would have likely remained poor to this day.

Instead, my wife chose to not have the child and got an abortion in the first trimester. We kept it to ourselves, married later, and are still together today. We both fought our way out of being poor people to being on the upper spectrum of middle class. We decided we just didn't want kids and now we spoil our niece. I will swear right now that we would never have made it to where we are today if we had been forced to raise a child because of someone else's deranged idea that every child must be born regardless of the future in store for it.

So, yes, I can speak to what an actual poor person goes through in that situation. We were lucky, because there weren't laws rammed through by religious people who have no clue of the consequences, just a strong delusion that God wants all children born. Funny how those religious people wash their hands of the aftermath of their crusade. Even funnier are the ones that quietly send Mary Lou to California to 'visit an aunt' for a couple of months when they find out their spawn got knocked up.

TL;DR

If you fight against easy abortions, except those where the child has reached the capability to survive if it had to be medically removed from the mother, you and the rest of your ilk can go fuck yourselves.

That was a very long way to remind us of the same problem that has always been the problem with EV adoption. WE NEED MORE CHARGING STATIONS. There I saved you however long this video is. He's not wrong btw.