I don't think there's any way to revolutionize schooling on average. I do think that there are ways to make it dramatically better for specific kids. Pull up the tails of the distribution and you do improve the average, but not by a whole lot, since most kids by definition will still be...average.
I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.
I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."
The claim was that "virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things", not that "virtually all young kids love to explore and learn multiplication tables".
Sure. But the fact of the matter is that we must teach kids many diverse things, and most of them are going to be things that some (or even most) of the kids have no interest in learning. So one has to grapple with the question of how to teach kids who don't actually care about learning what you're teaching.
Note that some of this is competitive benchmarking, and often encouraged by those men's partners, and tends to circulate around the way bullshit does because there are relatively few reality checks.
For the longest time I thought I was 5'9". Then my sister got a new boyfriend and was like "Yeah, he's 5'10". Well, I met boyfriend and I was at least an inch taller than him, so I guess that meant I was 5'11". On to my dating profile 5'11" went. Girls I met were like "You're really tall for an Asian dude" and my coworkers were like "We have an unusually tall team", so I got plenty of validation for my newfound height from external sources.
I finally went to the doctor's (yeah, it's pretty common for men to skip a few years in their 20s and early 30s), and sure enough: I was 5'8.75". My sister's husband is 5'8".
Just because someone else lies about their height doesn't make it right for you to do it. It's the sign of a lowlife, of a person with no integrity. I never would, not even a single inch. A man who lies about one's height will inevitably lie about many other things.
I hear this argument repeated a lot, and I think it is legit the reason for the 2nd amendment - but it doesn't make sense with modern technology. That authoritarian government is going to come at you with Bearcats, helicopters, and drones. Firing a gun at them is just going to make you cannon fodder. If you want to actually challenge the authoritarian government, you need MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and drones of your own - which is probably why MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and soon drones are heavily regulated, with stiff penalties for just ownership, and guns themselves are free to possess.
what you have said, is exactly why the 2A legitimates bearing arms, not only firearms.
the origin of the US is about being able to resist unreasonable force, and thats the root of the 2A, being able to resist, due to an uninfringed right to bear arms, to the end of checking the force of a militia having strayed out of its rights.
I'd agree with that on a philosophical level, but no court has actually interpreted the 2A as legitimating the right to build a cruise missile, MANPADS, or nuke. Try it and I suspect you're looking at a very long prison term. Usually people look at me like I'm insane when I suggest that "Well logically, the right to bear arms should include the right to bear nukes, so all this stuff about 'born secret' and classified information is unconstitutional."
I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction.
I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the whims of big Internet companies. Because I think that there's a lot of value in having physical possession of your bits and bytes and control over how you access it, along with nobody else having access to it. My kids are still young enough that they prefer the playground over the computer (and maybe there's a generational thing where at least the 5 year old will actually decline screen time so he can go plant seeds or paint or something), but I want to build actual tech skills and knowledge of how the digital world is put together in them, rather than just having stuff fed to them.
What age were you in 2011? I'm willing to bet 14-21.
I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people.
I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.
I was 30 in 2011, and working on building that Internet future.
2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.
I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.
I divide up the world into the pre-iPad world and the post-iPad world.
Less because of the iPad itself (though it was the first mainstream 'consumption first' device in my mind) and more because of those sorts of early user-hostile and spyware-first models that were coming out around that time.
I am much older but I consider Ivy Bridge and the iPhone 4S to be the best. So that's around 2012.
I also think the 11 inch MacBook Air was the best laptop, but there is no equivalent nowadays because Apple wants you to buy an iPad+keyboard, which is actually heavier. The last year for that MacBook Air was 2015.
Nothing has come out after 2012 that interests me at all, including the 'AI' stuff
That's what I experienced early in my career, and then I independently discovered Rule 3: "Tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke."
The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.
A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.
Yup, my breakdown was that I couldn't understand that the client doesn't actually care, they actually prefer to be lied to. Personally, I decided not to live in any system where either side is acting like this. Knowing the rules probably wouldn't have helped me, because I would've found the whole thing (and still do) disgusting and idiotic.
In practice there's a lot of issues with asymmetric information. The company knows its own operations and financial position better than random traders on Wall Street. It is rational for it to buy back stock when the market value is lower than the true intrinsic value of the company, and to sell stock when the market value is higher than the true intrinsic value of the company. Therefore, traders often treat buybacks as a signal that the company is "cheap" (at least in the company's own view) and pump up the price accordingly, and treat stock issuances as a sign that company management believes that the stock is "expensive" and push it down accordingly. Company management has more inside information than market participants do, but is usually prohibited from trading on it. Stock issuances and stock buybacks are one of the few cases where insider-initiated trading is legal, because the benefits accrue to the company as a whole rather than a few individuals.
I agree, and traders will also take into account the fact that there is a gold rush going on (into AI) and consequently view this issuance as not as much of a sign that company management believes that the stock is expensive as they would have if no gold rush were going on.
If people actually dumped index funds for cash en masse it would be catastrophic. To attach some numbers, MSFT averages about 35M shares in daily volume, and that includes all the market makers, HFTs, etc. BlackRock (iShares) owns 593M shares of MSFT and Vanguard owns another 482M. Together, the amount of shares that index funds own is about a month and a half of total trading volumes. I'd bet that such a crash would unfold over about 2-3 days, which brings up the specter of stocks literally going "no bid", where there are not enough buyers for every seller to sell, at any price.
Likely the government would step in and inject cash directly into the markets to support them in such a scenario, because a broad-index stock market crash is the modern-day bank run. Retirees carry the bulk of their savings in the form of stocks; if it disappears, we'd likely face revolt.
Same old story of too big to fail. The government will "inject cash", that is borrowed, so that retirees 401k accounts don't go down. But who pays back the borrowed funds? The non-retirees. Everything is optimized for the boomer generation to be fine, who cares about anyone else?
If you hit sell on a vanguard ETF and it sells on the market, then Vanguard isn’t the buyer is it? So in that situation with everyone dumping ETFs there would be a lag on the time taken for the ETF to sell and Vanguard to then dump the stocks back out in the market. It’s never occurred to me the situation where huge numbers of people dump index funds and how Vanguard/Blackrock account for that without becoming bag holders of the underlying stocks themselves.
In any case, I’m not sure that large enough numbers of ETF holders are sitting close enough “to the button” to hit sell in the event of a sharp downturn occurring over the space of even a week or two. And a lot of them would see it as an opportunity to DCA into the dip anyway.
If it's an ETF it's a little complicated. The usual mechanism for selling an ETF is that there's a buyer on the other end who's buying shares in the ETF itself, not the constituent stocks. Arbitrage keeps the price in line with the index constituents; if the ETF diverges from its constituent assets, some HFT can buy the ETF and sell the constituents and that will force them to converge.
However, most ETFs are also setup such that they can create or destroy shares in response to large shifts in demand. In this case, if enough people hit sell, the ETF itself will buy back shares and use the proceeds to sell the underlying assets, in a transaction that mechanically should be market-neutral and just propagate the supply/demand of the fund down to the individual stocks.
With Vanguard specifically, it's even more complicated, because VTI is not a separate ETF. It's a share class of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund. But the mechanism is largely the same - it has the same Authorized Participant system to mint new shares in case of high demand and redeem shares if everybody sells, and then passes these requests on to the underlying mutual fund, which can then piggyback on some of the tax efficiency benefits of the ETF.
> CRSP indexes were also recently changed to better accommodate fast entry. New IPOs are eligible for CRSP's suite of indexes after five trading days, provided they pass the index's eligibility and investability screens. Previously, these screens included having at least 10% of shares qualifying as freely tradeable (known as float shares outstanding, or FSO). However, in April the methodology changed to allow stocks with either 10% FSO or approximately $3.3 billion in float-adjusted market capitalization to be eligible for index inclusion. The weighting of stocks in CRSP indexes is also based on free float, which should help address the investability challenges associated with thinly traded stocks.
I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.
I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."
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