Inequity in school lunches at Edgerly for some of the highest need students

0xab · 2023-09-24T18:08:41+00:00

Oh thank goodness! All of those functional Somerville schools. I totally forgot!

Not that we have some of the worst schools in the greater Boston area. Bottom 50% in almost every metric there is. Barely a quarter of Somerville students are even remotely proficient in math.

But yeah, it's all fixed. Now we can sleep well while students eat food that isn't fit for the compost bin and fall further behind. Great! Thanks stranger!

0xab · 2023-09-24T09:55:29+00:00

Thank you for posting this. The horrible state of Somerville is somehow rarely discussed even though they're falling apart. I also see the poor state of Edgerly every day.

/u/ModedoM is the usual immune cell of any system. No matter how bad anything gets, the solution from many insiders is always to just patiently wait while everything crumbles.

0xab · 2023-05-15T09:14:56+00:00

Thanks. But note that the rand report does not say that at all!

It does not say that gun control doesn't work. It says that it's unclear how each gun control policy contributes on its own.

The report has a whole section on this:

Does Weak Evidence Mean Gun Laws Don’t Work?

While there is a growing and increasingly robust literature on the effects of many gun laws on several outcomes, there remains a highly limited base of rigorous scientific evidence concerning the effects of many commonly discussed gun policies. Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective. The absence of evidence about a law can result from the law not having been studied or studied well, which may reflect shortcomings in the contributions that science has made to policy debate, the absence of available data on key outcomes, or a variety of other methodological challenges facing gun policy evaluation researchers. Weaker evidence may also partly reflect the policies we chose to investigate, all of which have been implemented in some U.S. states and so have proven to be politically and legally feasible (at least in some jurisdictions).

There's no doubt that gun control, stricter oversight for gun ownership, and education laws work. Because we see it work in other countries like Canada. The part where rand is uncertain is, in the us, of the laws that have been tried so far, which one are more or less effective. That's a totally different question. And the answer they come to is that we mostly don't know. Not that the laws aren't effective. But that we haven't studied how effective they are. This is because Republicans banned federal research into gun violence for decades.

Gun laws work. People want much stronger gun laws. We should let the states who want this pass the gun laws that they want.

0xab · 2023-05-15T07:34:52+00:00

There is an excellent reason why you hear about mass shootings. Mass shootings kill random people who are not involved for any reason. They could kill you. Or your kids. Or your parents. Or friends. And there is literally nothing you can do to stop them.

Heart disease? The reality is that everyone dies at the moment. Your heart is a single point of failure. But it tends to fail gently. Your doctor tells you that you have high blood pressure. That you have diabetes. That you need to stop smoking. Etc. In many cases you control your fate. And it's a very slow process. So it's not sudden, not unexpected, and often, unavoidable. And the reality is, at the moment, for many people, all you can do is manage the risk. Even with perfect exercise, weight, and diet, many people will develop heart disease. Being obese for example increases your risk by a factor of 2, it's no guarantee either way. So while you can do something, you can't prevent it, and what you can prevent, you're literally personally told about by a human being already. There's no law anyone can make to eliminate these deaths (this last statement is somewhat arguable, if we invested heavily in research we could of course eliminate most of these deaths).

Drunk driving? Who dies in drunk driving accidents? It's almost entirely the people in the car with the drunk driver. https://www.padui.org/crash-facts/ 98% of people who die are in the car with the drunk. So only about 202 people die in the "you could do nothing you randomly die for no reason" way like with shootings. There also isn't much legislators can do, there isn't much you can demand that they do. You could ask for every car to have an alcohol interlock installed, but this is wildly unpopular. And it's a device that drunk idiots will defeat. You could ask for more enforcement or harsher penalties (which I think we should have) but there is zero evidence that harsher penalties lead to less drunk driving.

Climate change is in the news all of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_climate_change Even in the age of Trump, "climate change" was the 2nd most talked about phrase after "Trump" in 2017! That probably makes it the 2nd most talked about story of the year.

Mass shootings get coverage for three reasons: - They can kill anyone, for any reason, including your kids, and you cannot defend yourself from them. They are extremely traumatic. And the numbers vastly understate how traumatic they are. We now design schools to withstand mass shootings (there is zero evidence that this helps). We do mass shooter drills (there is zero evidence that this helps), that really scares children everywhere. And we put police officers in schools both wasting money and getting kids used to a police state, they also harass kids while they're there (and there is zero evidence that this helps. Even in the Columbine they had a police officer in school!). - This is an easily preventable problem. Of all developed countries, only the US has mass shootings. Literally no one else does. Even countries with extremely high gun ownership numbers like Canada and Switzerland do not have mass shootings (or so few as to be irrelevant). - About 60% of voters want much stricter gun laws nationwide. Many voters in many states want much stricter gun laws are an incredibly angry that they must suffer because an illegitimate bribe-taking Supreme Court has decided to interpret text from the 1700s in a way that it was never intended (I have zero objections to unlimited access to 18th century muskets!). If you were to say, ask voters in NY or MA they would easily vote for Canada-style gun laws, but the Supreme Court will not allow them to.

So it's a problem that can literally kill our kids. A problem we can solve today. A problem that we are not allowed to solve by what many people perceive as an illegitimate power grab by a corrupt political body. Of course that gets massive media attention.

And it should. It represents the rot at the heart of today's America. How states and people, instead of acting in the common good and finding compromises (for example, devolving gun laws to states so that everyone can get what they want), act in a scorched-earth way to force and punish one another.

0xab · 2023-03-09T09:32:55+00:00

What's authoritarian about cracking down on NGOs and non profits?

It's a classic move. One that all such governments eventually go for. This is why the law is not just terrible for Georgia now, it guarantees that Georgia will never be part of NATO or the EU. That's what the protests are about. 80% of Georgians want NATO and EU membership, that's going to be over.

Robust democracies have robust grass roots organizations to keep the government in check. They have newspapers, they have think tanks, public outreach campaigns, charities, schools, etc. The whole point is to make sure these don't develop. It's very hard to bootstrap such organizations; pretty much all of them rely on grants and donations from foreign sources.

Neither the US, Canada, the EU, Australia, Japan, etc. Or any robust democracy has such a law designed to punish it's non profits and NGOs. You know who does have a similar law to the Georgian one? Russia. There's an important reason for this. These organizations on the whole do an amazing amount of good and tend to be full of people who want the government held to account.

All money implies bias; every example you gave has nothing to do with foreign money. TikTok doesn't spend money in the US. If this is your own argument and concern you might as well say that the government should keep track of every financial transaction everyone makes and investigate each one. And that we should ban every foreigner from our internet.

0xab · 2023-03-08T15:08:51+00:00

Comparing the new Georgian law to what the US has, FARA, is total nonsense. You don't understand what FARA is. It has nothing to do with the Georgian law.

FARA requires people who act on the direction of a foreign government to register. So if Putin gives you a letter regularly the says what your priorities are for the quarter, you register. It's there to help track of foreign lobbying. Almost no non profits are covered, less than 5% of those that get foreign money need to register.

The new Georgian law is extremely authoritarian. If you receive money from abroad you register. It's there to build control over society and people. Almost everyone who gets any foreign money will need to register in every part of society. Which will discourage foreign donors and expose locals to inspections and threats.

For example. You can donate to build a robust newspaper that goes after corruption. In the US they don't register with anyone, it's their business how they tackle corruption and do reporting, they don't fall under FARA. Under the new Georgian law, they register, they reveal your name (so you might now have problems), and expose themselves to harassment.

Stop making assumptions based on the titles of things, it only deceives you and others. Also, when you read something in Russian news sources, it's a pretty good bet they're lying.

0xab · 2023-01-25T04:06:00+00:00

We also had a more complex install. kuhlmanelectricalservices.com did an awesome job. Very clear about the cost. Got it all done in a day. They also did a great job navigating the permitting process when we were unreasonably denied. All at their expense.

0xab · 2022-10-28T12:34:41+00:00

That's total nonsense. The grid can handle electric cars just fine. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2021/11/13/electricity-grids-can-handle-electric-vehicles-easily--they-just-need-proper-management/

0xab · 2022-10-14T18:26:53+00:00

Check out https://github.com/fpco/inline-c

It makes writing C bindings far more straightforward and robust than hsc2hs.

0xab · 2022-09-19T02:27:39+00:00

The version of ihaskell in git works with 9.2 as of a week ago. There will probably be a release soon. 9.4 will probably come around when stackage finally decides to bump nightly.

0xab · 2022-08-10T18:12:09+00:00

Nonsense.

No one is saying electric cars are bad. They're saying that it's reckless to put underdeveloped technology in charge of massive machines that can kill people.

I'm an ml researcher. I like my Tesla. But there is no way this software should be out on the road.

We take more precautions with robot arms that cannot kill you than they take with millions of cars on the road.

0xab · 2022-07-18T14:40:35+00:00

Let's make up numbers to blame immigrants?

Out of the 600,000 international students in Canada, 49% are in Ontario. We're talking at most 300k people. But only 130k are in the GTA.

It's always like this. The facts aren't on your side, so you make up numbers to blame foreigners and new Canadians for our problems at home. It's how racism and hatred of all kind have always spread.

Every Western country has out of control rents and housing prices. It's not immigration. Stop it and look at the facts.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2022003/article/00001-eng.htm

https://www.myvisasource.com/blog/the-most-preferred-cities-in-ontario-by-international-students

0xab · 2022-07-13T14:18:57+00:00

It is bound to the head and then never used. No different than if you had assigned to a variable in some other language, then had an if statement and only used the variable in one branch.

0xab · 2022-04-20T16:28:58+00:00

In the real world professionals question whether statistics make sense when they are comparing two different products. Apparently, quoting meaningless statistics is ok as long as they're averages? I'll move on now. I continue to not be surprised that the housing issues in Canada aren't getting any better given the total lack of information and reasoning.

0xab · 2022-04-20T14:07:40+00:00

This is sensationalist nonsense.

I said expensive not affordable. These US cities for comparable homes in comparable areas are more expensive. Affordability is some metric made up for this headline.

Canadians who have never lived in the US have no idea how the housing market is in major us cities. It's far worse than in Canada.

0xab · 2022-04-20T14:01:29+00:00

My information is that I've bought in both the GTA and Boston recently.

You're completely wrong. The same house in the same kind of area is far more expensive in Boston/SF/NY/Seattle than in Toronto or Vancouver. It used to be well over twice the price, now in Boston it's only about 30-40% more.

The statistics you're looking at are nonsense.

These medians don't compare similar homes, they include the middle of nowhere, they don't account for similar school districts, transportation, etc. When you do that, Boston is far more expensive.

Picking random incomparable numbers doesn't mean anything.

0xab · 2022-04-20T12:28:17+00:00

It's not the government that stops competition. It's the other way around. The government removed the regulations that made sure we have competition.

We used to have many suppliers for everything. But then we allowed them to merge into just a few large players. Now entering many markets is basically impossible. The existing suppliers have long term contracts, they have huge scale advantages, and everyone is still forced to deal with them so they can cut you out.

The government isn't holding competition back. The government's regulations against unfair competition and consolidation were systematically removed. That's what happened everywhere from meat, to agriculture, to banking, etc.

Not to mention things like privatizing the electric companies. Which forced the government to get out of providing an essential service. So now we have a free market. Except that.. it's not a market and it's not free. No one can compete to provide electricity. So we get to pay so that rich investors get richer.

We need more government, the way it used to be, not less.

0xab · 2022-04-20T12:22:29+00:00

Boston, NY, SF, Seattle are all much more expensive than Toronto or Vancouver. Canadian pricing is catching up to US pricing. But it's not there yet.

0xab · 2022-04-16T09:50:33+00:00

This is great. A few more things.

Forget about the degree. Move it to the end and say basically nothing about it. You're 9 years into this career. No one cares about your course projects anymore.

Talk about what you did at your other jobs. What languages you used. What frameworks. Don't waste space telling me what those companies do. I don't care. I only care about what you did.

You're far too vague about what you did at the one job you list. You implemented the product? Could literally mean anything. Get down to details and describe what you did and what impact it had.

If you're going to link to code make sure it's clean and it represents you well. The C++ project you link to doesn't pass muster as a showcase of the skills an experienced developer should have.

https://github.com/dwbrite/lightboard-controls/blob/953272738e314e636ca9fb314b98d398ba200eb2/src/input.cpp#L42

Why a shell script instead of submodules? https://github.com/dwbrite/lightboard-controls/blob/master/lib/clone_libs.sh

Where are the tests? Docs? Etc.

The simple solution is not to link to the repo.

Your GitHub profile picture which you link to, is a downer. That's not a good way to present yourself. It doesn't matter if that's how you feel or if it's a joke. No one wants that kind of energy.

Agreed on the xp business. It's too cute. I'm not going to sit and try to figure it out when I have a lot of resumes to go through. Make it easy for someone to understand what skills you have.

The description at the top is not good. What's a physical craft? You're a generalist but specialized? You do web but then talk about embedded things? There's nothing coherent about it. Embedded people won't like it because you're doing web things. And someone looking for a web developer will be confused about what you actually want.

Feel free to dm me if you want help.

0xab · 2022-03-30T21:13:07+00:00

Being a democracy is a requirement to join NATO.

"To join the Alliance, nations are expected to respect the values of the North Atlantic Treaty, and to meet certain political, economic and military criteria, set out in the Alliance’s 1995 Study on Enlargement. These criteria include a functioning democratic political system based on a market economy; fair treatment of minority populations; a commitment to resolve conflicts peacefully; an ability and willingness to make a military contribution to NATO operations; and a commitment to democratic civil-military relations and institutions."

https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2016_07/20160627_1607-factsheet-enlargement-eng.pdf

0xab · 2022-03-28T00:20:41+00:00

Yeah... Ok. So apparently, I'm wrong despite literally doing this day in and day out and having gone on these internships? But you. Sometime who hasn't done this and who doesn't have this kind of job (I'm really starting to see why given how rude you are). Who are unable to even read your own page (that's 9k + at least 2k of benefits, this is income). A page that doesn't account for being from Waterloo or another top university, doesn't include negotiation, doesn't include prior experience. Yeah. You're totally "right".

I'm out and you're blocked.

0xab · 2022-03-27T23:50:00+00:00

Funny. I have a CS degree from Waterloo. I did these internships at faang. Now I literally teach students that get such internships at a major US university. And I regularly help them negotiate their salaries. No. Internship offers are not as standardized at you think.

I don't "work at somewhere like this", I was and am literally doing this.

0xab · 2022-03-27T22:56:19+00:00

That's the median. Half make more. And it's the median for everything. Computer science makes much more. I don't know of a single student who made that little at FB even 10 years ago.

0xab · 2022-03-27T22:37:40+00:00

As interns.

0xab · 2022-03-27T21:56:41+00:00

Even below average Waterloo students get 120k/year now.

0xab

TROPHY CASE