9 / 100,000 = ?
Congratulations you’ve demonstrated that I haven’t been to every single educational institution in the country so I must be wrong. You must be right about everything and my opinion is obviously invalid.
Also it’s important to note that my distaste for public schools doesn’t come from my experience of being home schooled. If anything being home schooled for me, was a disaster. My parents were profoundly mentally ill and extremely abusive. Being under their thumb for an extra 6-8 hours a day for five extra years wasn’t a good thing. In fact I take some pride in the fact that I made home schooling me such a difficult proposition that my parents threw up their hands and put us all in public school. In that way I saved my youngest brother from having similar experiences to my own.
Given that I don’t think homeschooling is right for most people. At the same exact time I think that the single best luxury you can buy wrt child rearing as a highly capable person is to educate your own kids. It requires an enormous amount of time (and time = money so this is very expensive indeed) and resources to alleviate the significant downsides of homeschooling (lack of socialization, lack of expertise in every subject)… But if you have the time and money to solve these problems I think you can provide a significant leg up for your kids. I’m fortunate enough to be in that situation.
Some of us just want to show up at work, do our thing, get paid, go home after 8 hours and do whatever makes us happy. If I’m just a cog in the machine who gets replaced then whatever I’ll go find another job, I dont give them anything extra or pour my heart into a company so I dont expect anything from them besides a paycheck. I couldn’t care less how valued I am by an employer, I dont need their approval or praise to make me a happy person. It seems like you are obsessed with your work and attach a lot of your value as a human to it. If I worked in a high stress job that required long hours or had to grind like crazy with a small self owned gig I would be absolutely miserable.
People should be working much less than we currently do, Euros have kind of figured this out but Americans are so fucked up with their obsession over working long, hard hours.
4 Likes
Obviously you’ve had a tough path that is different than mine and definitely not average, but because of that your generalizations are not going to be as relevant to people whose frame of reference is different than yours. You don’t like public schools you don’t like home schooling, OK, but don’t expect anyone else to like the implications of that.
Nah I’m not getting screwed and like I said am mostly happy doing what I’m doing. What I’m not happy with is people like you who consider factory workers or other lower skilled workers drones.
You say you don’t look down but your posts are filled with looking down on those jobs. I can escape being a drone in your eyes by gaining skills…says it all.
4 Likes
If they are getting paid a living wage and are happy with how everything is going they aren’t who I’m talking about. The fact that you think that that’s the normal state of affairs is you showing your privilege. I’ve never held a job where employee morale wasn’t abysmal. I choose to take literally hundreds of miserable people at their word about how they feel about their jobs.
I think that the median worker in the US is very unhappy with how they are being treated and I think that they are right. If that’s me looking down on them… that’s your opinion.
I agree generally with people saying that you shouldn’t have to go out and upskill to get out of a bad situation… but that’s the only practical path available to most people and it’s what I did to get out. I’m speaking from personal experience here.
Pretty much. I’ve had opportunity’s including poker to make a lot of money but those non drone jobs made me unhappy. I was more living to work in them rather working to live.
Here’s the truth: society needs drones. And I am appreciative because I would suck at those worker bee jobs.
I disagree with the notion that everyone ought to be their own boss, independently self-employed. That strikes me as the libertarianish BS which, to get back to the original point of this thread, inspires people to believe they should be in charge of their own self-defense by owning guns.
1 Like
I used to think similar to you and then I stopped being an asshole and believing I knew everything because I thought I had enough experience to make generalizations.
Some people like being drones and spending their free time not worrying about work. Others are driven and work is their life.
I used to deal poker and I hated it for most of my entire career. And others I worked with didn’t like it either. But there were plenty of people I worked with that were perfectly satisfied with their station in life. I envied them to be happy at a certain point in your life and get joy from outside stuff.
I’ve generally liked your posting on this site, but this, and your public school stuff, is a bad take.
Ffs
1 Like
I was going to use this exact example, but thought better of it. The fact is, these kids know shootings are actually taking place. While I’m sure it was scary for kids when they used to run those ridiculous “duck and cover” drill movies in the event of a nuclear attack back in the 50s, the difference is there had never been an actual nuclear attack
Agree with the rest of your post
I agree with this if you are assuming the “drones” are making a livable wage. Sure, there are those such as yourself (and myself) who aren’t happy with the 9-5 and are willing to work harder and longer hours to get ahead. Maybe we’d even be willing to risk not making any money or losing our own capital in the pursuit of bigger dreams. And if so, and if we’re successful, we deserve to make more than someone who’s happy to punch in and out and leave the workplace behind them to go spend time with their family and watch TV. They prefer security over risk taking and worrying about work. And they shouldn’t be paid as much as managers, or entrepreneurs who take their work home with them. But they do still deserve to make a living wage imo
Just for a little counterbalancing anecdote…
I loved public school. My first grade teacher was my first hero. She taught me to read and to begin to think of myself as my own person. A few years later, my fifth grade teacher taught me the power of stories as political tools. We spent half an hour three days a week having group discussions called “Stories with Holes” where the point was to set up a story that didn’t really make sense and then think critically to unpack what happened. I didn’t think much of high school…but I was kind of an obnoxious contrarian at the time. When I went to college I again had several inspiring teachers that taught me all about Dunning-Kruger…lol. I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was, and then showed me how to move beyond that in a productive way.
Of course there are lots of shitty public schools, too. But my guess is that your experience was highly impacted by moving schools so often. A good teacher is similar to a parent in that it’s a tough relationship to build from scratch, but once it’s there it hurts a lot to lose. Moving schools every year would also make friendships really tough, I imagine.
2 Likes
We tend to overreact and sensationalize tragic events. I have Trump co-workers who are scared to death of Muslims, Mexicans, and black people who just can’t grasp the fact that if you’re a white male you are many times more likely to die at the hands of another white male. But those deaths don’t make the national headlines nearly as often, so that statistic flies right over their heads. The same is true with mass shootings. Any of us are more likely to die from the flu or some moron texting/drinking while driving. This doesn’t mean that even 1 shooting death, especially that of a child, is one too many. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about some maniac with a gun storming their classroom over what position they’ll play in their pickup game after school
I think any sensible person would agree that arming teachers not only is not only a bad idea, but incredibly stupid and absurd. I’d like to think if we could just stop sensationalizing every issue and trying to scare people (like parents over the incredibly low odds of their kids being gunned down at school and gun owners over taking away their guns) and instead, talked about reasonable gun regulations and solutions, people would ease up and not dig in so hard to hold their positions to the point of fanatical and we’d be able to reach some sensible solutions imo
90 minutes training seems sufficient.
How man states still even have that? I’m sure the NRA is hard at work trying to kill it.
and a poet
4 Likes
Not sure if this goes here:
“the school said in a statement that it would no longer allow random alumni to bring cannons to home football games”
Glad we cleared that one up.
1 Like