It has achieved the same level of awareness as the average emacs user.

I don’t know but I want to burn its owner at the stake upside down so he has to scream through the drippings of his own rendered fat.

Damn, where was this? In lat and long?

“we” did?

I just gave up entirely. I never tell your wife her ass is hot.

Is there a name for this phenomenon?

A lot of modern popular culture was invented in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and so us millennials born in the 80s and 90s emerged into a world where all the adults had Star Wars and Star Trek and Indiana Jones and Jaws and such on their minds, so the adults making kids shows wrote them as references to media we didn’t have time to watch yet. So by the time I was old enough to sit down and watch Star Wars, I knew the plot already. We kinda got pop culture backwards.

I didn’t grow up with Care Bears, I was raised on a steady diet of Sesame Street and Eureka’s Castle, so this specific instance is news to me but this kind of thing happened a lot. Does it still?

Wait! How’d they wrangle that? They…oh wait it’s parody.

Muppet Babies would occasionally use actual Star Trek and Indiana Jones footage, they could get the rights because 20th Century Fox. I doubt Paramount let them use actual TNG footage.

I have a direct answer to that question! The oral history on how the Care Bears made a Star Trek parody can be found in a recent video by Allison Pregler: https://youtu.be/t_pYuglkn84

People sell them on Etsy.

It is my understanding that German vehicles were designed as advanced, high performance machines with impressive capabilities…but that meant they required intensive maintenance by specialized technicians and thus not easily replaced. A German truck, new or well maintained, would kick a Jeep’s ass. Except the US made and transported 1.73 frillion of them plus parts and tools.

Is that the one where Rock “The Dwayne” Johnson bodyslams Seven of Nine, or is that the one with all the glimpses?

I’ve heard that story told a lot. Germans marveled at the Willy’s Jeep, not because it’s a particularly good truck, a German truck was a work of art compared to a Jeep, but America had so many of them we didn’t need to give a damn about them. Blow one in half with a mortar and the yanks’ll just go to the motorpool and get another. Plus the bougie assholes leave their engines running! They act like they got plenty of gas.

The Japanese were disheartened to learn the US Navy operated ice cream barges. They were struggling to come up with tires, we had pineapple sherbet.

You can pour cheap, bad wine into an expensive looking bottle and people will like it more. Marketing is pretty much all wine has going for it.

Chicken Parmesan is what happens when you take Italian people and put them in America. You take Italians, with the cooking methods they know, their tastes, and set them down in 19th century New York, they make Chicken Parm. This is a well-tested hypothesis.

I knew someone was going to make my point for me better than I ever could have.

I have voted Democrat in every election since 2006. That was a mid-term. I voted for Obama twice, Clinton once, Biden once, and Harris once. I voted no on North Carolina’s bathroom bill in 2016. Is this the behavior of a “transphobic alt-right nazi?”

No. Voting Republican is, like 13% of LGBTQ voters did. I’ve done more for LGBTQ rights than 1 out of every 8 American queers. Actually, probably more than that, probably closer to 1 in 6 or 5, because that 13% is out of those who bothered to cast a ballot at all.

So you get to miss me with that slander.

“Wokeness.” Allow me to reiterate: Andy Weir writes stories about the peoples of the world setting their differences aside to work together to solve problems using science. Stories of mankind’s greatest triumphs, our finest hours, are those of cooperation and evidence-based understanding of reality. Anyone who is actually woke, actually enlightened, would be overjoyed at seeing folks on the right embrace those stories. An actual enlightened person would be trying to think of more ways to get more stories like that in front of the right’s eyes.

What I see out of the self-styled “Woke” is absolute language policing. To the same or even greater degree than The Right, The Left, particularly the “inclusivity” enclave, demands obedient conformity to in-group norms. You will be declared an outsider and most heinous enemy if you say the wrong things, say things the wrong way, or talk to the wrong people. I am not your ally, not because I hate you, but because you make it impossible.

Specifically what should be in the curriculum? Well, the way I see it, school gets more and more useless the older students get. Elementary school is mostly on the money because reading, writing and arithmetic. We probably need to shake out some of the whitewashing that’s done in social studies class; all the “And then the Indians showed the pilgrims how to plant a fish with the corn seeds to act as fertilizer” shit but I think you get it.

Throughout middle school, they started letting kids choose the electives they wanted to take. For me this started out as “do you want to take Spanish, Band, Orchestra, Chorus or ‘Career Studies’?” There was one period a day that we didn’t ALL share in common. We need to do more of that, cater to students’ interests better. I think high school should have majors like college does.

The best education I find is when the environment simulates or actually is real work. Auto shop class in which real maintenance and repair is done to real roadworthy vehicles, conducted in an environment that simulates a service station is vastly superior to “Here are five random cars the owners abandoned with the school as a tax write off. They were broken when they got here and nine classes before you broke them worse. Take the wheels off and put them back on I guess.” My high school carpentry shop teacher treated us like employees of a general contractor, and we built a house. We would go to the job site, divide into work teams and work on a section of the building, from girder beam to shingles. I came out of high school not only with a head full of theory, but I was ready to walk onto a job site and work because I knew the job.

Shop classes have been disappearing. Students who didn’t take those, who took AP classes and such…what did they emerge from high school ready to go do as an adult?

I’m also of a mind to reject the notion that, you spend the entirety of your childhood and adolescence on school, and maybe even early adulthood if you go to college, and then once you’re done that’s it, no more learning now you work. That’s insane. “I’m in school.” “I’m out of school.” “I’m going back to school.” This notion of everything having to be multi-year curricula that must be entirely completed to earn a certificate and those four semesters of chemistry and physics don’t count because you failed persuasive writing so no future for you…it’s psychotic.

says his movies do good because he doesn’t do politics.

He’s almost certainly right. I haven’t encountered any significant our side/their side political mud slinging in his works. His two biggest hits, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, both feature nature itself as the antagonist, and all of society, everyone everywhere, setting aside their differences to work on solving the problem using the most powerful, righteous tools available: Science and Engineering.

Now, what cohort would you expect to try to cancel the author of books like that? The dogmatic, anti-science, fascist right wing? Nope! It’s the assigned-gendergaseous-at-tumblr crowd, because he does something other than recite the colors of the pride flag.

Which of those two groups did you expect to be the most insular and shunning? Was it the skinheads or the bluehairs?

…

…Fearsome predator.

Tuna are giant fish that live far off shore. Cats are known to fish but they won’t land a tuna any more than a dolphin.

Debate me, I guess.

As per your instruction, I shall.

I am a certified flight instructor, I have studied the fundamentals of instruction and can speak with authority on the subject.

it seems that some people think learning is a net negative or neutral for whoever is doing the learning and that one should learn as little as possible.

Learning is an active process. There’s a reason for turn of phrases like “spend time” and “pay attention,” these actions aren’t free. Any act of learning comes with a real cost in time, energy and likely money. It also comes with an opportunity cost. The time and effort a student spends learning could always be spent doing something else; resting, playing, working, caring for family, or learning something else. It is possible for those costs to be so great as to be a genuine net negative for the student. Especially when the reality of formalized school comes into play.

One of Edward Thorndike’s six fundamental principles of learning is the Principle of Readiness. This ties into Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. As a teacher, you have to always ask yourself “Where on their pyramid does my lesson fit? Is everything below that on their pyramid of needs well taken care of?” Your students will not be willing to pay attention in algebra class if they’re hungry, thirsty, sleepy, freezing or scared, because their needs for homeostasis and security aren’t being met well enough for an intellectual lesson such as higher math.

Okay, we got the kids fed, rested and secured. Now they should pay attention right? Nope. That isn’t good enough. Where on their pyramid does this lesson fit? What need of theirs will learning this satisfy? Genuine curiosity about the universe and its workings are always always always at the stabby point of the very tippy top of the pyramid, you want to satisfy that need you’ve got to categorically solve every other need these kids can have from romance to personal prestige. Schools and universities love the image of the career scholar, the men with SI units named after them who conducted experiments for the good of humanity…the reality is the very few extremely privileged people who got to play that game were old money wealthy, they owned land and had servants if not slaves to take care of all their material needs.

When a child asks why they have to go to school, they’re told that school is where they learn the skills they need to survive as adults. though Elementary school, you can take this argument seriously. Learning how to add and subtract is necessary for the basic act of paying for things, reading is the most OP skill you can have, reading clocks and calendars is demonstrably important, etc. That argument starts falling apart when you’re preventing people from going out and earning money to live so they can generate standardized test scores in pre-calculus algebra, or being told not asked what the symbology of the blue curtains in some novel is.

Because here’s another thing about the principle of readiness: It is the teacher’s responsibility to inform the students of the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “Someday algebra will save your life” is meaningless; we live in a world with quiz game shows, literally any trivia knowledge can be life changing. You have to be specific and realistic. Otherwise your students aren’t going to spend the effort, they’ll merely go through the motions, like pretending to be sad at a great aunt’s husband’s funeral.

Especially on Lemmy I’ve seen the argument that education shouldn’t be mere job training, it should be about ultimate enlightenment. Except we need to achieve a world where everyone can afford rent before we can play that game, Tiffany. And we haven’t. Survival skills come before abstract beautiful truths and if we’re honest we’re doing a piss poor job of both.