That was brief.

I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

Hmm. 5.5 minutes of good info, making us think about tricky ways that online stuff gets us to click or pay attention to stuff that isn't good for us (the audience) but can benefit the creator/host.

And then there is a brief cut to black that doesn't obviously mark an endpoint, continued background music that doesn't mark the change, followed by a paid sponsorship shill for "hey, if you're worried about this shit, TOTES BUY THIS VPN DUDES" plus icons for "obviously you want some merch or to donate to my patreon!".

insert [I don't want to live on this planet anymore.jpg]

Maybe I'm just a cranky bastard in my old age.

Your video, White House Press Briefing: When Is The Impeachment?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

We both knew who we were looking at when we were about 50 meters away, it was hard to miss the man, he was immense and even more "immenser" to a 10 year old. I think my sister got more of a kick out of Curious George and his green tongue.

We where walking out of the prop plane area and about to cross a checkpoint into the bigger part of the airport to grab our bags. Andre was chatting with the security guards.

Both of us were stand-offish at first but he caught our eye and extended a brief greeting, I had the sense that he and Curious George were about to catch a flight as he was wrapping up his conversation.

Can't forget that voice either, so deep but very calm and kind.

He immediately became my favourite wrestler from then on, even through the Hulk Hogan era.

I thought she would stay awake. When the drug started wearing off I was instantly reminded of Jacob's Ladder. The brief time she spent awake must seem like a dream turned into a nightmare. Was it real?

Politico has a long piece on Boehner. It includes this little gem:

On Sunday, July 17, it appeared they had a deal. Boehner and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor—whom the speaker had reluctantly brought into the negotiations, knowing the majority leader’s distrust of Obama could poison the talks—worked out some final details that morning at the White House. When the president returned from church, Boehner says, he invited them both into the Oval Office and shook their hands. Some fine-tuning remained, but in Boehner’s mind the so-called grand bargain was done. The framework included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” Boehner tells me.

The next 48 hours changed everything. On Tuesday morning, the so-called Gang of Six—three senators from each party who had been discussing their own sweeping fiscal agreement—announced a briefing for their colleagues at the Capitol. They unveiled a separate framework, totally unaware of what Obama and Boehner had agreed to. This deal included significantly more revenue. Chambliss, by then a senator, was one of the GOP Gang members and had no idea—because Boehner had been negotiating with the president in private—that their announcement would kill the speaker’s deal with the White House. Obama saw that Republican senators were endorsing a deal that included far more revenue, and knew there was no way he could sell the grand bargain to his liberal base. When he came back with a counteroffer, seeking a higher revenue number, it validated Cantor’s warnings about not trusting the president. And by that point Boehner’s members had heard enough about the grand bargain to know they didn’t like it—with the $800 billion revenue figure, much less something higher.

So the deal fell apart, and the two sides peddled their competing versions of events: Boehner’s team said the White House moved the goal posts, while Obama’s allies said the speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal.

Sounds exactly right to me.

Difficulty not only in answering questions but in actually understanding the question. --- Check!

Leaves some questions unanswered. ---- Check!

Makes random shit up because he either doesn't understand perfectly simple questions, or has absolutely no concept of the material in spite of ample access to expert briefings (in bullet form even!) ---- Check!

I'd say 70-80 is about right. He probably was higher a few decades ago, but he appears to have some form of dementia now.

He got fired from his part time paramedic job. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/349352-cop-who-arrested-utah-nurse-fired-from-paramedic-job

Ian Welsh reminds us of a quote by Mark Twain:

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

I'm also familiar with the relatively small pineberries; neat to see these huge white strawberries. Might just be a curiosity, as its possibly noteworthy that they didn't have the journalist trope of brief interview snippets from customers saying, 'oh I love these white strawberries, they are so delicious', or 'oh my husband doesn't like regular one but loves these white strawberries', etc..

That's the worst time, the inevitable second act dilemma, of PC building.

You can budget in the expectation of how long it takes to do the housekeeping stuff. Loading the OS, essential programs, personal preferences - the games themselves...but there's often that one random thing.

I built a nice medium-range game PC with someone else recently, my building partner was so excited. It's amazing how much of a bond that creates between people, or how it can strengthen a relationship. Not just for building PC's specifically, but for sharing something and having that moment of realization of how cool that thing shared really is.

I felt more pissed off than anything for a brief moment during the boot up, when the display seemed to shutdown startup before anything really happened. Luckily, I'd paid attention enough when researching the GPU and eventually remembered someone mentioning there was a button on the card itself that controls the LED lights on it, pressing it seemed to clear whatever was blocking the startup processes for the card.

There was definitely a soul-crushing few hours of doubt and agony before I remembered that detail. During that time, I stared at the clean interior of the fully assembled build, having had a hard enough time getting the cords to fit and wondering if something minor and imperceptible had wiggled loose, wondering if I would go mad.

Having someone else depending on the solution was another intense emotion heightening element. I'd done my best to prime for this likelihood. I'd shared stories of problems I'd had on previous builds, the random thing that went wrong. I stressed the fact that the computer had always, eventually, got built.

It's a good, stinging bit of humility for me. Even when I try to minimize problems and anticipate potential issues, I'll still miss something as obvious as a big button right in front of my face.

Sadly, the reason given, that Trump didn't like the investigation ramping up instead of being cancelled is not only not one of those good reasons, it's totally, unavoidably, obstruction of justice, a felony.

Also, firing anyone that disagrees with him is actually displaying weakness. Having the ability to work with those that are willing to oppose you is strength...a strength Trump is totally lacking.



Edit: and today it came out that in his closed door meeting with the Russians, he disclosed highly classified information that came from an ally...without notifying that ally....information called "code word information", the highest level of classification, so sensitive we don't share it with other allies....but he did share it with Russia. Apparently he couldn't help but brag about the "great intelligence" he gets in the daily briefing, and in the process probably burned an essential source of information on Daesh and Russian actions in Syria....but I'm sure you think that's just fine too.

Does the same apply to someone with their phone pinned to their ear with their shoulder while they flip through pages of a memo/brief? - true story

I lived in Cape Canaveral during the shuttle program and was fortunate enough to watch all but 5 launches live.

An excellent video with scenes I thoroughly enjoyed in slow motion and HD.

A brief mention in the video about the 6 seconds from when the main liquid engines ignite until the solid boosters ignite is called "twang."

When the main engines ignite, the power causes the whole assembly to rock forward. It takes 6 seconds for the assembly to fall back to vertical again and then the boosters light up and away it goes.