2025! is quite a ways away

what do you mean reasons other than us politics? do other kinds of reasons even exist?

”Money making is a skill,” the website states. “We will teach you how to master it.”

step 1: convince people to pay you 50$ for access to your deranged ramblings.

there is no step 2

this is absolutely the kind of company that would be using the word “content” when referring to images and videos.

they could probably get him to forget by giving him a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the back

i’ve only ever seen tankies complain about the word “tankie” being over used. i guess us non-tankies just don’t hear it very often.

there’s also this false dichotomy i’ve seen many tankies present where they try to argue that people are either liberals or tankies. it is possible to be a leftist and not support authoritarian governments.

it’s not too late to get a sad lamp. they really help me out when the sun starts to set at 4.

not for long!

6th recall this year so far

is diplomacy an option?

christmas wouldn’t be christmas without 42 geese

it was over as soon they casted kevin hart

i think this is a fairly reasonable gut reaction to first hearing about the “unnatural” numbers, especially considering the ways they’re (typically) presented at first. it seems like kids tend to be introduced to the negative numbers by people saying things like “hey we can talk about numbers that are less 0, heres how you do arithmetic on them, be sure to remember all these rules”. and when presented like that, it just seems like a bunch of new arbitrary rules that need to be memorized, for seemingly no reason.

i think there would be a lot less resistance if it was explained in a more narrative way that explained why the new numbers are useful and worth learning about. e.g.,

• negative numbers were invented to make it possible to subtract any two whole numbers (so that it’s possible to consistently undo addition).
• rational numbers were invented to make it possible to divide any two whole numbers (so that it’s possible to consistently undo multiplication, with 0 being a weird edge-case).
• real numbers were invented to facilitate handling geometrical problems (hypotenuse of a triangle, and π for dealing with circles), and to facilitate the study of calculus (i.e. so that you can take supremums, limits, etc)
• complex numbers were invented to make it possible to consistently solve polynomial equations (fundamental theorem of algebra), and to better handle rotations in 2d space (stuff like Euler’s formula)

i think the approach above makes the addition of these new types of numbers seem a lot more reasonable, because it justifies the creation of all the various types of numbers by basically saying “there weren’t enough numbers in the last number system we were using, and that made it a lot harder to do certain things”

completely agree. and it’s even more insidious when you take into account how he’s spent the past 6 years bragging about how he has a salary of $0 because he’s “only working for the betterment of humanity” or some nonsense like that.

Board chair Robyn Denholm wrote in a letter included in the regulatory filing: “Elon has not been paid for any of his work for Tesla for the past six years… That strikes us, and the many stockholders from whom we already have heard, as fundamentally unfair.”

Musk’s compensation for 2023 was $0, the filing showed, as the billionaire does not take a salary from the company and is compensated through stock options.

it’s so unfair that elon hasnt gotten a single pay check and has instead had to settle for making billions off of his stock options. think of all the mega yachts and social media companies he could’ve bought if only he had been paid a salary.

Everybody knows what free speech means.

i really dont think so.

free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know “it only applies to what the government can do to you”, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.

and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)

you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.

i agree that parents should not have a monopoly over the information that their children get, but i think that well-educated school teachers are a better solution to this than the internet. (although this would require the US to put some kind of emphasis on improving its education system, so it’s probably unlikely)

sorry for your loss

at the higher levels you start to see all kinds of crazy stuff, here are some examples:

• mathematicians abstracted the idea of measure and then found out not everything can be measured
• we know there are different sizes of infinity, and we know what the “smallest” infinity is, but it’s impossible to “know” (ie prove in ZFC) what the “second smallest size of” infinity is
• we took the regular number line and made it longer just to see what would happen
• The Hairy Ball Theorem, which says “you can’t comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick” (quote from source)

but as with any discipline, a big part of how much fun it is to learn has to do with how it’s taught. i think it’s possible to teach middle school/high school geometry in a way that makes it fun and engaging, but it’s often not taught in this way. there’s a great article/paper that talks about this. it’s written to be very readable and accessible, although it is a bit long (but you can get the basic idea in the first 5-7 pages). he talks about how terribly math is taught in school and how it’s no wonder so many people hate it as a result.

he also talks about how learning math could be much more fun if it was taught differently. he gives a really great example of this when he discusses something as simple as the formula for the area of a triangle (on the bottom of page 3 to the end of page 4). i tried to summarize it for this post, but i don’t think a summary would do it justice, so i strongly encourage you to read it if you’re interested.

i’d be a math teacher. hopefully in the commune i’d be able to avoid the rigidity and tedium of the regular math curriculum, instead being able to focus on the fun stuff and foster people’s curiosity.