"After ingestion, bismuth is primarily found in trace amounts within organs such as the kidney, liver, spleen, and, in rare cases, the brain, where it accumulates intracellularly—especially in lysosomes and nuclear membranes—and extracellularly in basement membranes of blood vessels.[1-4] In normal therapeutic use, the amount of tissue-bound bismuth is extremely low and is not associated with adverse effects.
Potential consequences of tissue-bound bismuth are generally negligible at standard doses, but chronic or excessive exposure can lead to toxicity, most notably neurotoxicity (bismuth encephalopathy).[1][4-6] In cases of bismuth intoxication, histochemical studies have shown accumulation in neurons and glial cells, particularly in the cerebellum, thalamus, and hippocampus, with clinical manifestations including confusion, myoclonus, and encephalopathy.[1][4-6] However, these effects are reversible upon discontinuation of bismuth exposure, and recovery is typically complete within weeks.[5-6]
Animal studies confirm that bismuth binds to proteins such as ferritin and metallothionein, and is retained in lysosomes, nuclear membranes, and myelin-associated proteins.[2][4][7] The kidney is the primary site of accumulation and excretion, and tissue levels decline after cessation of exposure, with little evidence of permanent retention at therapeutic doses.[2-3]
In summary, permanent tissue binding of bismuth is minimal and clinically insignificant with standard use, but chronic high-dose exposure can result in neurotoxicity and other organ effects, which are reversible after stopping bismuth.[5-6][8-9]"
1.
Autometallographic Tracing of Bismuth in Human Brain Autopsies.
Stoltenberg M, Hogenhuis JA, Hauw JJ, Danscher G.
Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. 2001;60(7):705-10. doi:10.1093/jnen/60.7.705.
2.
Metallobiochemistry of Ultratrace Levels of Bismuth in the Rat II. Interaction of Bi With Tissue, Intracellular and Molecular Components.
Sabbioni E, Groppi F, Di Gioacchino M, Petrarca C, Manenti S.
Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology : Organ of the Society for Minerals and Trace Elements (GMS). 2021;68:126752. doi:10.1016/j.jtemb.2021.126752.
3.
Distribution of Bismuth in the Rat After Oral Dosing With Ranitidine Bismuth Citrate and Bismuth Subcitrate.
Canena J, Reis J, Pinto AS, et al.
The Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology. 1998;50(3):279-83. doi:10.1111/j.2042-7158.1998.tb06861.x.
4.
In Vivo Distribution of Bismuth in the Mouse Brain: Influence of Long-Term Survival and Intracranial Placement on the Uptake and Transport of Bismuth in Neuronal Tissue.
Larsen A, Stoltenberg M, Søndergaard C, Bruhn M, Danscher G.
Yep -- every message I send includes a requirement that CC read my non-negotiables, repeat them back to me, execute tasks, and then review output for compliance with my non-negotiables.
I would prefer if awards were given to people for something they achieved, not for something they promised to achieve.
The Arab Spring did not occur in a vacuum. If you're satisfied with America's public or private involvement, great. General Wesley Clark has a rather infamous interview from 2007 that you may want to consider.
Anyways, I think Trump is better motivated by not giving him the Peace Prize.
Unfun fact, the Arab Spring was caused by a spike in food prices, not from any sort of political or leadership changes or behavior. The spike in food prices came from an unfortunate combination of bad weather in Russia and Obama's policies (specially biofuels). To his credit, Obama pulled the plug on the biofuel disaster after about 6 months but by then, it wasn't spring anymore and the Syrian civil war had already begun.
Trump is a jerk. and he makes a million promises and keeps like 10. He isn't the type of person that is afraid of looking bad because he broke a promise, he's more likely to use a peace prize to justify violence because after all, it has to be someone else's fault since he has a peace prize awarded to him.
Maybe there should be other prizes for life time achievement or something, but the Nobel committee seems to be intent on promoting peace instead of giving kudos to someone.
I think neither obama or trump qualify, even to promote peace. it implies that they are law makers. in the US, the president is supposed to be an executive that takes actions, not a legislator that has the power to start or end wars. Treat them like kings and be surprised when one of them dumb enough to think he actually is one starts acting like it. that's the state of things unfortunately.
> ...he makes a million promises and keeps like 10.
Depends on who he's making the promises to.
Everything he promised during the election in terms of vengeance, hatred, ignorance, bigotry, etc. as enumerated in Project 2025 has been fulfilled as promised to a T, or is on its way.
In fact, from that perspective, I'd say he's kept more promises and acted more quickly on them than any other president in history. As long as the promise includes cruelty or injustice, he is as good as his word.
It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.
They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.
> I also have bright rope LEDs surrounding a few of my room ceilings, hidden behind coving. That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming. Summer days, indoors, all year round.
I am intrigued -- please can you share any publicly available image of this solution? I'm not sure what to google search, or what it would even look like. But I am interested in feeling better while stuck indoors all day.
“Cove lighting” is the architectural lighting term used for this sort lighting installation. You build coves out of gypsum or wood and then install LED tape lighting into a plastic or metal channel and bounce the light off the cove to create indirect lighting. You can use cove lighting to illuminate a ceiling, or accent a wall, which is called perimeter cove lighting.
There are a number of other types of indirect light fixtures (and direct/indirect fixtures, most commonly as suspended linear fixtures with LEDs on both the top and bottom of the fixture).
> That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming.
The description from GP, and the photos in the article you linked, seem like polar opposites of each other.
"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
Hah! Guess they didn't see these voting patterns coming! They gave you “A republic, if you can keep it.” - I will admit, you gave it a pretty good run.
Guess they didn't see that coming says guy quoting them seeing it coming - u.
^ here you can downvote this one too
just don't be so smug. So many smug takes, not enough critical thinking. All of the founding was littered with irony anyway. He is to have said that to someone who couldn't vote, right? What does that imply?
They were men after all, not gods - as they warned later generations to remember. One wonders what your theory, what your solution is. What is your form of government? After all, in a different time perhaps something like a pardon is a useful instrument against the sort of mob rule they feared. Maybe it isn't. The Congress of the founding is far different from that of today.
But if you follow the broad strokes of what they predicted and what has happened, it's hard to argue they didn't see this coming. In fact they did. If they failed in preventing it that is one thing, but they clearly foretold of that possibility. And they ultimately decided it's up to the future, not to them.
Many of them signed off on compromises they already predicted would lead to conflict within generations, as it did (the civil war). As for the rest of it, I'm annoyed by your analysis and its lack of self awareness. Getting mad at you over "my country" makes no sense unless you are an alt for someone in power.
Regardless, I suggest you should read more about the debates during the founding if you care for a more nuanced perspective. Wherever you call your home, it cannot be totally immune to the same sorts of questions they grappled with, which afaik humanity has been wrestling with across cultures and across generations for all time. Have a good day
> They were men after all, not gods - as they warned later generations to remember.
Indeed.
A digression:
If you read the Federalist Papers, or the debates of the Constitutional Convention, you can get a sense of what they were trying to do, which was to come up with some form of government that would work reliably. They had a few specific things they wanted to avoid.
First was a king. They'd fought a war to get rid of a king, and didn't want that again. (Well, Hamilton wanted to be king, but few others agreed.)
They wanted a stronger central government than the Articles of Confederation the country was then running under. That was like the United Nations - a group of sovereign states that could only act as a group if everyone cooperated. It wasn't working too well, which was the reason for a constitutional convention.
They wanted to avoid anarchy. The French Revolution was about to happen, and the run-up to it wasn't looking good.[1]
Those were the design constraints. Most of the arguments were over how strong the executive branch should be vs. the legislative branch, and how strong the federal government should be vs. the state governments.
As working models, they had the state governments, where a governor and two houses was the usual pattern.
They ended up with a reasonably practical design. It's come unglued because Congress, which is supposed to be in charge, can't get its act together.
If you get scammed by a box on wheels being rolled down the road or someone repeatedly saying HTML5 then...you had it coming and it is probably best that someone else uses your money.
Also, CEOs of public companies lie persistently, huge lies that directly cause people to lose money. Nothing happens because that is the part of the game: they lie, you try to work out if other people will believe it for long enough. For startups, because there is no existing revenue, the lies are criminal. There is no distinction in reality.
> If you get scammed by a box on wheels being rolled down the road or someone repeatedly saying HTML5 then...you had it coming and it is probably best that someone else uses your money.
I'd prefer to not give liars and cheats even more money so that they can improve their grifting - this is not behaviour that benefits society at all.
Someone should be selling motivational posters with these kind of funny quotes from our dear "tech leaders". There should be a gallery of funny quotes to choose from so I can put them on my wall and feel better about myself.
Same!! I'd definitely consider buying some for myself, and perhaps also as gag-gifts for other tech friends lol. I happen to have access to amazon merch from forever ago, which doesn't have posters, but does allow throw pillows.... I might spend the weekend playing with one lol
Wow. Quotes like these really illustrate to me that I may have some massive blind spots and lack a lot of skills that help make people lots of money. This fellow is worth $3 billion and just spouts gibberish.
I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks. I have a pack of a few friends who have been doing this for years. I think most of their ideas are pretty awful, but who knows, maybe one day they'll be right?
Even this site is maybe a good example. You can apply to YCombinator with little more than a partner, plan, and pitch. The worst that happens is they say no, and if they say yes then you get a $500k funded shot at your idea with lots of advice on top and people trying to help you succeed. Yeah the chances of acceptance are low, but if you've ever read applications for pretty much anything, a ridiculous amount are just complete garbage, so your chances are better than the numbers suggest if you're halfway competent.
> I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks.
Also remember survivorship bias: lots of folks with "initiative and [high?] risk tolerance" fail, but you may not hear about them.
I don't think most fail is the right word. Because for instance appealing to my personal anecdote of my friend pack of serial entrepreneurs, they're mostly making beer money from their projects.
If you clocked the hours they spent and compared it to a decent consulting fee then yeah - they're losing lots of money. But in reality they're doing that stuff during the time that most of us are shit posting, browsing the web, playing games, and so on. And so if you compare it to that, they're making a hefty chunk of change with the upside that they do have a chance, whatever it may be, of something really sticking and that being their to the Moon project. And you know, even just getting to the atmosphere is enough for a life changing result.
Or getting back to the Y Combinator thing. It costs $0 to apply, and the worst that happens is that they say no. All it takes is giving up a bit of time off our shitposting time. But that's somehow not an offer many of us are willing to accept, which is really pretty weird if you think about it!
This is correct. HN is full of people making mid 6 figures that can't seem to get over the idea that people making 7 figures or more are doing it unfairly just because those people aren't scaled up versions of themselves. You don't have to be smarter than a good engineer to be a good founder or CEO because it's fundamentally a different skill set and risk tolerance. They latch onto single cases of fraud and generalize it to all rich people because it is convenient. Of course theft and fraud occurs at all levels on the org chart, but it doesn't make the news when some IC steals a couple hundred K from his company.
There are plenty of fair points many would find uncomfortable trying to accept from above, particularly around how much risk is sensible to take and deal with. Hell, even knowing and believing people tend to undervalue risk... I still don't think I take enough risk myself.
At the same time, I think going from mid-6 to 7 figure income is a lot less controversial than 10 figure net worth. It's still unlikely to be related to whether someone is a scaled up version of another, but at what point you consider the reasons for earning that much "fair" tend to go a lot deeper than plain fraud.
The people who succeed the most with fraud are those who tell lies that people want to believe. A LOT of people wanted to believe that there could be a second electric car company and that they could get rich off it. That is why the fraud worked so well.
AI is the same. I am pretty sure at any company you have executives saying things about AI that not only aren't true, they can never be true. However, this is the story that people are willing to believe.
Also, just generally, the question is wrong. Perpetrating a massive fraud is very time-consuming and, ultimately, requires a level of self-deception that most people don't have the energy for. Milton, SBF, etc. did the things they did because they wanted to believe they were someone other than who they were. There is nothing wrong with knowing who you are and just being that person. To say this another way, Milton was clearly unwell, he is now unwell with more money than can be actually used, being unwell is not an example for anyone particularly when you trade it for something with extremely limited marginal value.
> The people who succeed the most with fraud are those who tell lies that people want to believe.
Jason Zweig:
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
A difference in skill level is not a difference in morality. Nobody is out there only scamming people out of thousands because they have a moral objection to taking millions.
It also goes hand in hand with people undervaluing the act of taking on risk in the first place. Hence overbeaten cliches like "insurance is a scam"/"stock market is just gambling" etc.
(Don't get me wrong there are systemic issues with both of the examples above, but the point is fundamentally there's value in understanding and taking on risks that others might be less willing to take)
That said, looks like this guy is actually more of a "self made man" as he started several businesses out of college with moderate success. The first was an alarm company (Spoiler, those are generally MLMs and there's 100 of them). Looks like he was just successful enough at it.
It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM ends up in trouble with the SEC.
A non-snarky comment is in my experience the LDS church puts a great deal of emphasis on entrepreneurship, wealth, and "excellence in all things" that leads some to do great things and others to shamelessly steal and cheat.
Fraud is an essential subcomponent of entrepreneurship. You cannot have one without the other. If I am trying to get you to invest in something, you have to swap cash today for a vague promise about the future.
This does not make it less wrong but fraud is essential.
It's somewhat morally neutral in my view if someone is successful because their rich parents funded their aspirations. However, it has to be recognized just how insular big successful businesses are. It's more the exception, not the rule, that someone goes from rags to riches. They usually have a rich family member backing them. It's not what you know, it's who you know.
If you make $1 more than some other person in the world, you're richer than them. Where is the connection between being $1 richer and requiring that much less integrity?
I think the lack of integrity can make it easier to be rich. I also think it is required to become a billionaire. That said, I've known more than a few rich people who are good people.
So where is your evidence that there's any difference between those people and a billionaire? Where is your evidence that there is some regime change in business success that requires a change in the type of person that can achieve it? Sounds like nothing but envy to me.
The argument goes, as one's wealth grows, your capability to prevent harm, suffering, and other general bad things in the world grows as well.
There exists some point beyond which your wealth is so large, your ability to prevent harm so large, and the impact of doing so on yourself so small, that continued wealth accumulation beyond that point indicates a lack of integrity.
Where that line exists is of course debatable. "A billion dollars" is usually referenced because it's such a large value that it's easily over the line.
I am extremely averse to arguments that place a moral obligation on another person which does not apply equally to the person making the argument. If it is immoral for Jeff Bezos to buy a yacht when he could have given that money to charity, then it is also immoral for me to spend $10K on a ski vacation because that is no more necessary to me than a yacht is to Jeff Bezos.
Furthermore, I object to the concept that money spent on consumption is any worse than money spent on charity. That money I spent skiing goes to plenty of worthwhile economic activity and people's salaries just as Jeff Bezos yacht money goes to pay the boat builders and crew. The only difference between that and charity is emotional impact and the fact that a charitable donation doesn't inspire envy in others like a yacht does.
> The only difference between that and charity is emotional impact and the fact that a charitable donation doesn't inspire envy in others like a yacht does.
Well, okay, sure, I guess you can make an argument that "we're all atoms and therefore there is no morality and therefore buying a third yacht and helping pay for a 4-year-one's cancer treatment are equally good and moral".
> it is also immoral for me to spend $10K on a ski vacation because that is no more necessary to me than a yacht is to Jeff Bezos.
My argument rests on the impact to the giver's life. So yes I agree that if the marginal impact to your quality of life of $10k on a ski vacation is equal to Jeff Bezos buying a yacht, sure, that's immoral. Just how it would be immoral for people far less wealthy than yourself to decline to share, say, $0.10 if it would have a real impact on something.
The difference is of course then that $10k has much more impact than $0.10, and the price of a yacht much more than your $10k.
And if you have the ability to spend $10k and have the zero impact on your life that Jeff Bezos experiences when he buys a yacht with billions are left over, then you too are standing by as children die of cancer.
Forgoing a $10 million yacht would have 1000x the impact of my ski trip, but if 1000x as many people can afford a $10K vacation, the impact is equal across society. And yes, I do stand by as children die of cancer, just the same as you do.
You're still missing the point. It appears you're arguing against a commonly made argument that is not the one I am making.
I can afford a $1k ski trip if I plan and budget for it. You can apparently do the same for a $10k trip.
Jeff Bezos does not need to do that for a yacht. It makes no difference to his quality of life, his ability to feed, house, or care for himself.
When someone has so much in excess of what they will ever need, then failing to use what they do have for good, that makes them a bad person.
Choosing to plan and budget for a $10k ski trip instead of charity does not put you in that bucket. If you were instead able to make a $10k ski trip, each weekend November to April, each year, on a whim without thinking of finances, and did not donate to charity, then that would make you a bad person.
It's not "did you theoretically have the ability to help the child with cancer", it's "did you have that ability with essentially no downside to yourself". If you can take a $10k ski trip, and donate literally $0 each year, then you're a bad person.
I'd say the clearest example would Steve Jobs vs Wozniak. They were equal partners with Woz doing far more of the work. At nearly every turn, Jobs took the opportunity to stab people in the back if it'd personally enrich him. Jobs ended up running Apple and a billionare while Woz ended up a millionaire.
Part of the reason Woz didn't end up as rich as Jobs is because when moral problems came up, he was the one willing to cut into his own wealth and finances to "make things right".
People that become billionaires do not care about making things right or fair. They care about accruing wealth.
There are examples of that everywhere. Tesla would be another. Elon became absurdly wealthy off the backs of underpaid and overworked employees. The early days of tesla/spacex he sold the idea that "you'll change the world!" to undercut the salary of his employees.
Now, these could be just specific shitty examples. There may in fact be a number of billionaires that have treated their employees fairly and given back to the system that got them there. But I'm decreasingly convinced that that is really the case.
He definitely was the magic ingredient early on. But it's because of Jobs and his drive to make Apple huge that I'm typing this on a Mac.
You need line level employees who churn away at Tesla & SpaceX & Apple, but you also need the visionary maniac to force those companies into existence. Some things can only be done by large companies, and those simply don't just appear without a massive driving force.
> They were equal partners with Woz doing far more of the work
What counts as "the work" and what doesn't such that Jobs did much less of it than Woz?
> People that become billionaires do not care about making things right or fair.
I don't even consider myself, or anyone else, to even be capable of making things right or fair or even knowing what would be "right" and "fair". This is not a remotely simple thing and there is not even a widely agreed upon definition of it. I see no evidence that billionaires care any more or less about this than any other person. And I fundamentally distrust anyone who claims this as a motivation. Mostly those people are just using the word "fair" as a stand in for their personal preferences as to how things should be.
> The early days of tesla/spacex he sold the idea that "you'll change the world!" to undercut the salary of his employees.
Employees in the early days of Tesla made out like bandits on their options, so I find this to be a very strange objection. It's the same tradeoff any engineer at an early stage company makes.
I think this is perhaps one factor that feeds into the "reality distortion field" I have seen around particular leaders. You don't feel like they're trying to goad you into seeing it their way, you just sort of naturally start to believe in their project (their? is our project, comrade!).
Charisma (or Riz, now, I guess) is just a naturally in-built trait in some segment of the population. We evolved to be collective and cooperative by following leaders. We have never had a meritocratic or scientific system for choosing who to follow.
I do agree with your conclusion, but I'd add that charisma is also very much learned, like a lot of other traits. Lots of trials at seeing what people respond to and honing in on what works, weeding out what doesn't and if you're in the serial entrepreneur/cult leader business: an ever evolving language of sophistry that keeps up with the baseline level of critical thought, but also weeds out actual skeptics quickly because you don't want them around your followers.
I think it's important to point out that even extremely intelligent and talented individuals can lack critical scepticism when deciding to follow a leader or stay with a particular project. I've seen so much human energy and engineering talent go into a business that everyone should have known, didn't have organization, strategy, or actual leadership to build real product and be a viable business.
A lot of smart people get woo-ed by bad pitches or wrapped up in cults too. It's all about how the message is coded for the target audience. An astute MLM seller uses very different language to sell to a small farmer vs a young silicon valley graduate[1]. There's also the aspect of how vulnerable the audience is at that point in their lives, cults are especially good (bad?) at finding people in tumultuous periods in their lives, looking for any sort of hope and/or support system to pull them through it. Then the cult provides the community and short-term structure they crave at the time, to their long-term detriment.
Personally, how relatively smart and even generally skeptical people fall for cults and conspiracy theories is one of the most fascinating sociological phenomena out there.
[1] leaning somewhat on general stereotypes for the sake of argument, not insinuating all these people are the same, or implying anything about the relative intelligence of a farmer vs a silicon valley graduate.
Nearly all people value good articulation over intelligence. This is why people who interview well get jobs over people who do good work. It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't. And why Trevor Milton can bilk investors of claims about HTML5 supercomputers while nerds get brushed off talking about tensor-chip accelerated attention models.
The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.
> It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't.
I'm going to have to disagree. There are many things that make the two Steves different. Woz was just never interested in the same things Jobs was. Woz wanted to make cool shit. Jobs wanted to have his products rule the world.
He didn't. First, he gave away a good chunk to early employees who didn't have stock when the IPO happened. Then, he liquidated his Apple in the mid-1980s.
He certainly could have made billions if he had been greedy (not given any away) and lazy (just lived off the dividends and never sold) and never done another thing in his life - more billions than Bezos.
IMO it all combines into confidence. Which you can't project so to say if you can not make yourself believe in your own lies for a moment, and charisma is just another name for confidence. Or hutzpah for that matter.
Key point is to not let yourself forget what is that you're doing: manipulating people. Or in other words, don't forget that there is such thing as reality. Many fell into this one trap.
Either corruption was always happening maximally, and we've finally begun to notice , or corruption has reached a new maximum.
Either way, it's maximum corruption.
And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.
I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.
We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.
We are much closer to zero corruption than maximum corruption. How many times have you bribed a public official in your life? In many places it is considered a routine part of navigating bureaucracy.
And if you think decentralization brings fairness I suggest you visit some of the more decentralized parts of the world. Decentralization can solve some problems, but that's not one of them.
This sounds a lot like Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens. You can just hear the frustrated aide trying to explain a concept to him in the simplest possible terms and then he totally mangles it.
Here I am with my stupid USB-C ports that have an ugly, unwieldy dongle attached to them so that I can use my USB-A devices. If this is the future, I don't like it.
After moving my kids out of a bad elementary school and into a fantastic district with a highly ranked school, the differences are obvious. The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents.
The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read.
The new school has fun exercises like the "word of the week" -- and they swear they will rarely assign homework. The old school had mandated trips to the library so kids could take home books and ignore them, alongside a minimum of 1hr of homework per night.
In the bad school, a class of 24 had 11 kids who would not behave themselves, ever (one of the kids would often pick up his chair and hit other students and his aide). In the good school, a class of 24 has 1 kid with limited behavioral issues.
Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids.
Reading a french book ''enfances de classes'' from bernard lahire, it explains exactly that. Children from low ''resource'' family have agressive behavior, they are left as animals because their parents are not teaching them.
In my state, to live in an excellent school district is very expensive. We've been trying to move but always get out-bid and out-priced. Mind you we earn well above median but unfortunately, we were not "born early enough." Many folks living in the districts have been there well before it was expensive and probably cannot afford their own home if they had to buy it again. Shit sucks.
The commenter suggested the old school was filled with bad kids and bad parents, and by definition, this would include the commenter and their kids. Unless they are suggesting they weren't the bad ones, and were somehow unfairly placed with the riff raff. If that's the case, some analysis of why that is seems in order.
From the commenter: "The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents. The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read."
That appears to be their observation of the two schools they had direct experience with. What else are you asking they provide here in terms of analysis? Maybe average student test scores? Likely available as it appears they are talking about public schools here. If the new school has significantly better scores would that satisfy your analysis requirement? If the test scores within their household subsequently follow this trend would that be sufficient analysis? In general active/concerned parents are going to try to get their kids the best education available right?
Also can you elaborate on where you got the "unfairly placed" part? All that was actually said was they moved from one school district to another. People buy homes for school districts all the time...there's a section dedicated to school rankings on Zillow for a reason.
Yes, and performance is often correlated with property tax revenue. Low funds means less resources which influences the outcomes and behaviors of those kids. Put differently, "Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids." is less true than the available resources make the place.
A reasonable analysis would be less of the anecdotal "evidence" about laziness, and more of the demographics of that particular district.
By "unfairly placed", it addresses what you quoted: "The bad school had dull kids with bad parents." Was the commenter one of those bad parents, since they were by definition in that category? Or are they suggesting they were one of the good parents that was in the wrong place? Or did they become good parents once they found a better school?
"Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids."
Yes, a post that attacks kids is one that seems ripe to be critical about. (To say nothing about the implicit logic that their kids must also have been part of the problem, which goes against the general premise of the comment)
Unfortunately I didn't have time to load them all into a spreadsheet, perform sentiment analysis, and pick a few based on a proprietary scoring algorithm. Like most people, I scroll HN when I have some free time, and respond to a few comments here and there that catch my eye. It seems to me that you're seeing a deeper meaning to what you see as an "attack".
If you would like to point out a few comments that are hurling blame at children, I'm more than happy to offer my opinion on those as well.
kids with a poor home life often act out in class, or have other behavioral issues. It’s not their fault, and it’s not “fair”, but it IS a valid characterization.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that kids with a great home life _probably_ have parents or grandparents that advocate for them and really try to get them placed into a good school district.
One could argue that getting your child into a good school district is an indirect way of surrounding them with like-minded kids and parental influence.
True, but look to the generalization presented in the original comment, where an overall trend was suggested. What makes one district filled with "good" parents and kids, whereas another was "bad"? To say nothing of the implication that the commenter was one of the good ones in the land of the bad.
My premise is that there's underlying causes unmentioned, but implied (like socioeconomic status). You can separate groups from membership, and to oversimplify, if you move something from one side of an equation to the other, with different results, what you moved was truly the constant, and what was left behind was the variable.
