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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Ironically, I had friends in school who had come from juvy. I guess you could say prision fed into school instead? I’d love to ask them their opinions on that statement though and see how similar to prison school really was.

    As far as I can tell, that person is just rage baiting. If they genuinely believe school is the same as prison, having visited one myself (not for myself), all I can say is they should actually visit one and see for themselves what a prison is actually like.



  • I’m not sure why I see people treating banning smartphones in class like child abuse or something. The only explanation I have is that it’s a cultural thing. Obviously, if used appropriately, a smartphone is a valuable tool, but this is only if they are used appropriately, which some students will do and some won’t (and this varies as well from school to school and class to class). Where I went to school, a significant number of students did not use them appropriately during class, so not allowing them made sense since they distracted from the lesson.

    So, why do I have so little confidence that they’ll be used properly? Some people are posting anecdotes about their time as teachers in this thread, so I’ll post one from the student’s perspective. Despite smartphones not being allowed in my classes in high school, people used them anyway. Why? The teachers wouldn’t notice, or some might just not say anything. I played the heck out of one mobile game with my friends in both of my history classes, and nothing ever happened. I knew people who’d be listening to music during class too, and completely ignore the lecture itself. Almost everyone with a phone out used it as a distraction from class, not as a tool to help them learn. Despite there being a rule against them, I’d estimate more than half of the people I went to school with used them during class anyway.

    So why didn’t the teachers enforce it more strictly? My guess is because it wasn’t safe. Many of my friends carried knives at school for self defense. There were a lot of violent students, ranging from fights in the hallway to students being part of a gang. To be clear, this wasn’t by any means the majority of the student body, but it wasn’t an insignificant portion of it either.

    The violence escalated dramatically after the 2016 election, where students (who were understandably upset about the result) got up and threatened all the white people in the school. I had graduated by then, but I knew people who had to barricade themselves in a room with a mob of angry knife-wielding students on the other side of the door. Many of the students in the room weren’t even old enough to vote. One teacher left the school because of all the threats she’d received.

    Also, not sure how common it is to have a “senior prank day” at other schools, but we had one every year. The “pranks” ranged from spray painting threats to teachers on the outside of the gym, to destroying school property. Once they had to put classes on pause while a company came out to replace the locks on all the doors since the “prank” was to destroy the locks so the doors couldn’t be opened.

    This school was pretty tame too, compared to some of the schools I’d heard stories of. One teacher I talked to at a different school had stories about all the times some student threatened her or pulled a gun out on her or whatever, and it honestly just sounded like hell.

    Anyway, I wouldn’t say I blame the kids for this behavior, and while I have strong opinions against feed-driven social media, I don’t think it was a major contributor to these behaviors (this was before social media was as big as it is now). I think it really comes down to parenting, whether the parents are just bad at raising kids, or they don’t have time or resources to properly raise their kids, or their kids have needs they don’t know how to (or refuse to) satisfy. Regardless, a teacher can only do so much, so rather than trying to correct behaviors in students at the risk of their own lives, I think a lot of them just put up with it for the sake of the students who do want to learn.

    So if the rule is going to be broken anyway, why have a rule against smartphones? It sets the expectation of students regarding smartphone usage, and gives teachers an opportunity to enforce that rule when they feel it’s appropriate (and safe) to do so.

    Edit: I should also add that I don’t think most schools are this violent. This school was exceptionally bad, but it wasn’t as uncommon as you might think to have a school this violent.




  • Some thoughts on the comments on Discord:

    I can understand most of the arguments against Discord, and there are some problematic communies on it of course, but I’m not sure I understand how using Discord over an alternative puts someone more at risk of exposure to those communities. People are free to join and leave servers at will, so is the issue that these servers built around FOSS projects have toxic communities? If so, how would being on any other platform solve this?

    Speaking from experience, just about all the servers I’m in have some kind of “no politics” rule, a very inclusive “be nice” rule, and a pronoun selector. Maybe it’s just the servers I join, but hate speech gets people banned pretty quickly.

    Anyway, there are plenty of arguments that can be made about discoverability, lack of control, privacy, and the non-FOSS nature of the platform to justify its presence on that list.





  • I felt like neither side really answered the question about how they planned to address addictions in the US. They both talked about the US-Mexico border and trying to catch more imported drugs, but failed to address domestic production, and more importantly, failed to answer how they plan to address addiction in the US (as in current and future addicts).

    Also, the whole question about physical ability diverted so off topic that I lost what they were even talking about. Biden seemed to try to answer it, but then it took a sharp turn towards weight and golfing skills?

    Edit: I should also add that yes, Biden tended to stay on topic more. Trump always seemed to be answering a different/previous question instead.




  • The debate covered important questions of national significance, including whether Trump had intercourse with a porn star, who was better at golf, each of their physical health conditions (including Trump’s height and weight and apparently cognitive ability), and even featured a modern use of the word “malarchy”. They might as well make a short, catchy intro for it, break it up into episodes, and advertise it as a sitcom.

    The debate was completely useless. The only thing I got from it was that Biden’s brain still works but his body doesn’t, and Trump’s body still works but his brain doesn’t. There were some slight mentions of hot topics and each of their positions on the subject, but there was so much jumping around and avoiding questions that it was not very helpful.

    Honestly, I think one of the things Biden said should just be applied to both candidates when determining who to vote for: “Just take a look at what he says he is, and take a look at what he is.” (I believe this was used in context of Trump’s weight… lol) Both of them have served 4 years in office, and both have done stuff outside of the oval office. It’s easy to see how each of them would spend their terms based on what they already have done.


  • In my case, since I get DashPass through my CC (not directly paying for it), I’ve seen it discounted to below the price some restaurants list on their websites. I pick up all my orders myself though.

    I wouldn’t pay for DashPass directly, personally speaking at least. I don’t use DD nearly enough to justify investing more into it vs. just ordering on the restaurant’s website or calling in the order. The only reason I even use DD is because I get that as a benefit through my CC and it usually pushes the prices to same or lower as ordering directly.


  • Speaking as someone with a MTF close friend and NB spouse, but the term used in the article is the term everyone around me used when I was growing up. That term may be obsolete now, and if so, the author simply needs to be informed. There’s no need to assume they meant harm by it.

    If they knowingly used a term that may offend, then that’s of course a separate issue.





  • In addition to 1:many, many:many, and many:1 (which is just 1:many but looking at it in the other direction), you also occasionally see 1:1, for example if you want to augment a table with additional data. This might be done by having your foreign key also be your primary key in the augmenting table, since that would also enforce a uniqueness constraint on the FK as a result.

    Also, probably unnecessary to mention, but you can also have “0 or 1” relationship (meaning one side is optional but capped at 1). These are technically separated from “1” relationships usually when you get into all the theory. An example of this might be a “0:1” relationship using the above augment table, but where the augmenting table isn’t required to have a row for every row in the augmented table. (A 1:1 constraint can be enforced, for example, by having an additional FK in the augmented table pointing to the augmenting table.)