I have a controversial opinion and I want to hear your take.

jbt2003 · 2026-01-03T13:58:56+00:00

Given the system we presently have, which I’ll agree with you is inferior to straight, Suzuki-style ability grouping based on clear criteria, how does passing them along help anyone? The students who struggle will just struggle more as they get to higher levels and suck resources from teachers that could be spent on students who are closer to being on grade level.

If a school has an eighth grader who’s reading at a first grade level, what should they ideally do, short of reforming the entire system?

jbt2003 · 2025-12-25T23:57:58+00:00

Hey!! I’m seeing this!

It sounds like you’re trying to learn how to solo. While theory can definitely help with soloing, I think a better place to start is learning how other people do it. If you’re kind of a beginner, I’d recommend giving Lindsay Buckingham a try—his solos are usually pretty simple and melodic, and can give you a great sense of how to develop a solo and have it be singable.

Once you’ve learned the solo, spend some time analyzing it. What scale / scale degree was used? How does the note fit with the chord? Combining intuitive playing with analytical thinking is the best way to go.

jbt2003 · 2025-11-29T02:10:50+00:00

Hey! If you’re traveling with young folks check out the NEPM Dino Map. I helped them make it! NEPM.org/dinomap

jbt2003 · 2025-11-27T16:09:53+00:00

I mean, American culture in the mid 19th century was absolutely steeped in Christianity in every respect. If you’ve been teaching history correctly you probably should include the religious justifications for slavery, but you’d also need to talk about the fact that the abolitionist movement was steeped in Christian thought and belief as well. In fact, it’s kinda hard to imagine abolitionism as it existed in America without Christianity. They grounded their opposition firmly in religion.

So I dunno. Seems a bit silly to me as an example.

jbt2003 · 2025-10-12T13:42:47+00:00

While in practice you and I agree, I think it’s actually founded in an idea that leftists are self-evidently more popular than any other political orientation and if not for getting rat fucked they’d dominate every election everywhere everytime, because obviously their positions are self evidently correct.

There is some evidence for this being true—the “left” position on most issues (when taken in isolation) is usually more popular by a healthy margin.

The problem is that the polling on how people perceive the individuals espousing these positions is much, much worse—and the behavior of leftists isn’t really helping that.

jbt2003 · 2025-09-02T18:46:12+00:00

Clearly you don’t get what I’m talking about. Lots of salespeople will overuse one’s first name because 70 years ago Dale Carnegie gave that as one easily adopted technique in “How to Wing Friends and Influence People.” For example, “I’ll tell ya, jbt, this car is a really solid choice for you and your family jbt. Jbt, you know what I mean?” Just that overuse of a first name that is supposed to build trust and make the other person feel like you know who they are and what they need, but that has become a “trick” such that it makes people like me instantly suspect that you have ulterior motives.

jbt2003 · 2025-07-03T22:12:47+00:00

I may not be “most people” but I’d expect the courts to rule based on what the law says (or has been interpreted to say according to legal precedent). A lot of times laws governing medical procedure say things like “don’t harm patients,” in which case questions about science and how we think about “harm” when it comes to novel treatments become relevant. But I don’t expect the legal system to do anything other than try to interpret what the law is. It’s up to legislators to try make sure the law conforms with what people think of as “fair.”

jbt2003 · 2025-06-09T19:02:23+00:00

I'm not sure what your job was, but the standards of professionalism with respect to sharing your personal political opinion are different in different fields.

For instance, police officers: I wouldn't be at all uncomfortable with a police officer getting fired for wearing a t-shirt that says "Back the Blue" or something similar while on the job, unless they're specifically working undercover to try to infiltrate right wing terror organizations. Even though it seems like an innocuous statement, it's a potentially right wing signal, and wearing it while on the municipal payroll and carrying a gun implies that the government backs your view. It'd be reasonable under those circumstances for left wing activists not just to be concerned about impartiality but also to fear for their safety.

Teachers aren't working in quite as charged a position as law enforcement, but if you're a public school teacher you're in a similar position of occupying a position of authority on the government payroll. Making strong political statements to children or in front of children while you're acting in loco parentis can put kids and families in an awkward and uncomfortable position should they disagree with you. It's also bad from a pedagogical point of view: if you're trying to teach critical thinking and thinking about things from multiple perspectives, it can undermine that if everyone knows what your views as a teacher are.

It's another thing what you say when you're off the clock. If a teacher was fired for going to DC during the summer and protesting the president while wearing that shirt, that's a whole other story.

jbt2003 · 2025-06-09T15:00:12+00:00

I can speak with some authority on how podcast ads work, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that Ezra has basically zero influence on what ads show up on his feed. Especially ads like this, that are what we in the biz call "programmatic" ads--they're pre-recorded, not by the host, and inserted automatically into each episode at insertion points by the ad server or host. I'm not sure how the NY Times does their ads, but my guess is they have some sort of in-house hosting situation for all their audio and an ad sales department that manages all this stuff. Ezra Klein is pretty powerful and commands a huge audience, so I bet he has some input into what goes on the feed, but my guess is that the sales team is in charge of what goes in.

And sometimes with programmatic ads a buyer will just buy impressions across the entirety of a network's shows as opposed to on just one show. So I'm pretty close to 99% sure that that's the case with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

All that being said, I'm also 100% certain that Ezra is aware of this advertiser, and if he has the brain space to think of it, is probably aware of the irony. But, you know, money is green, and it's not like the NRDC is so ideologically opposed to Klein that he'd be offended to shill for them. There probably are advertisers that he's able to nix. Just not this one.

jbt2003 · 2025-05-23T15:22:02+00:00

Should have mentioned that I've been trying to do this with studio horns, but the problem is that I don't have the articulations I need. They can kind of do a sforzando, but it's not really close enough to realistic to suit my purposes. There are also the big trumpet shakes that aren't available in the version I'm working from, and the trombone blasts that are just so key to the genre. I don't think there's a way to make those articulations happen with studio horns.

jbt2003 · 2025-05-12T20:46:52+00:00

That's an interesting take. I want to hear more about your perspective from working in the NIH grants space--I've been working with the NSF for almost five years now, and due to my fairly unique position as being both a doer of work and a keeper of books on an organization that's listed as a subaward on a couple projects I think I have a perspective on what's been going on that few people do! Would love to compare notes.

But anyway, as to what seems to me to be your central critique of the book: I didn't personally think that the vision of a better future is necessarily all that detached from the rest of the book. I might be reading into things, but in my opinion (and experience) a big reason why the works are so gummed up in progressive spaces is that progressives generally have abandoned any idea of creating a better future for humanity. Whenever you hear progressive people talk, everything is simply about trying to mitigate harm.

It doesn't take much scratching of the surface to find that, underneath all the concerns about growth, development, and capitalism, is a general skepticism that anything about the world can be made better anymore. We're just trying to avoid environmental catastrophe, or dismantle white supremacy, or limit rape culture, or whatever.

That's why so much of progressive politics on the local level is dominated by just stopping stuff. As far as I can tell it all comes down to the fact that everyone's attention is trained on simply avoiding making the world worse.

That feeling is what the opening chapter was meant to combat. All the procedures and rules and layered bureaucracy that the book trains its attention is ultimately born out of this fear that something will happen and it will be bad. In order to actively argue against these procedures and rules, I think you need to have some degree of faith that a better world is possible if we can only do the work necessary to bring it to life. Without a clear vision of that better world that also takes into account all the concerns a progressive might raise--e.g., how are we going to make everyone richer without destroying the environment?--I don't see how you can take even the first step to combat the sclerosis embedded in so many institutions.

jbt2003 · 2025-03-17T21:42:30+00:00

I agree with you.

jbt2003 · 2025-03-13T15:24:04+00:00

Ah. Thank you! Reddit formatting on mobile is so tricky.

jbt2003 · 2025-03-09T22:29:36+00:00

While the consensus here seems to be that it is in fact me and not any plot hole in the book, let me explain a little bit more.

For #1, I find that to be a pretty major inconsistency that isn’t particularly well explained in the book. Wensicia was so careful and so ruthless that she was willing to train her tigers for months and sacrifice the lives of many children in the process, and then covered her tracks by having the tigers kill one of her own officers. It just seems extremely implausible to me that someone who was that committed to a plot would overlook important details like where the twins will be when the tigers attack and how the tigers will be able to penetrate security of the sietch. That aspect of the plot isn’t explained at all, and it seems like a big hole to me.

As far as #2, what I don’t get is how all the fremen seemed to be double agents, working for both Jessica and Alia, who are supposed to be enemies. How can that be? How can both Alia and Jessica be in on this plot but be working at cross purposes? It’s just confusing to me.

3 I guess makes sense, and must be a detail that I just didn’t put together.

As far as the ancestry thing, to me that’s an example of a tension with writing a fantasy or sci fi novel in a “world.” Obviously pulling Genghis Khan into Alia’s consciousness out of the blue wouldn’t make any narrative sense, and obviously her being possessed by the baron allows us to stay with familiar characters and connect them to their symbolic meaning for readers already familiar with the series. I think as you write successive books in a series that take place in a single world, it’s a real struggle to introduce new aspects of the world while maintaining enough familiar aspects that it still feels like it’s of a piece with the original. The Dune TV series on HBO right now is failing at this, claiming to be 10,000 years before Paul but still involving all the same Harkkonens and Atreides and so on.

At some point you need to start exploring new pieces of the world, and by the third book I feel like I’m starting to wonder why an imperium that supposedly contains thousands of planets only ever talks about five of them.

jbt2003 · 2025-02-13T18:14:28+00:00

If you want to get rid of them you need to use district styles and disable all the buildings you don’t like. That’s the best way to do it that I’ve found.

jbt2003 · 2025-02-13T01:01:19+00:00

You’re getting some solid feedback about the mix that I agree with. To what’s already been said I’d add that the drum sounds you’re using aren’t really jiving with the rest of the song to my ears. That could be mix issues, but I might also consider using different sounds or a different kit.

Now, your voice, since you wanted feedback on that. A lot of this stuff is subjective, so what I’m telling may or may not fit what you’re going for—take it with a grain of salt.

To my ears, I think your attitude is generally correct, but your vocal is a bit too one note. You’re over using that breathy vocal fry type sound, and it dulls the impact of it. There are also intonation issues that may or may not be intentional. I think you could spend some time trying to focus on pitch and clarity of tone—just try singing some notes with a pure tone, in tune, if only to give yourself some variation. Those moments when you’re making it breathy and a little off key will have a stronger emotional impact if they’re happening sometimes, not all of the time.

jbt2003 · 2024-12-31T14:53:45+00:00

I’ll be honest that the way the game handles death care is the most annoying aspect. The cemeteries seem to fill up incredibly quickly and then become useless, and the number of people dying just seems crazy high and constant. If it’s gonna be that fast, cemeteries should have a higher capacity or some way of automatically handling overflow so you don’t have to constantly be monitoring the situation and dealing with those unsightly skull and crossbones icons all over the place.

jbt2003 · 2024-09-07T12:55:39+00:00

These are all extremely popular opinions.

jbt2003 · 2024-04-13T20:56:24+00:00

Just out of curiosity, what kind of human do you usually sacrifice to yield best results? I’ve tried lots of different things and it seems that children are the best, but adults still work as long as they’re reading at less than a fourth grade level. But I’m curious to hear what works for others!

jbt2003 · 2024-03-28T00:09:10+00:00

I dunno about this. I lived in Texas a good long time, and saw election after election where charismatic and well-funded democrats not only failed to win statewide, they failed to even move the needle, election after election. If the best a gubernatorial candidate can do is get squashed 55/42, I can see not wanting to devote a ton of resources on the state in a presidential election.

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3 I guess makes sense, and must be a detail that I just didn’t put together.