My then-partner was part of the strike. One of the strike demands was higher wages as teaching assistants. And while I worked 40 hours a week, for $11/hr, I made considerably more and worked fewer hours than her. She put in probably 30 hours a week just on her teaching load, plus an additional 30 hours split between explicit course work and dissertation work.

It's crazy that a job that requires excellent marks while completing a 4-year degree pays worse, has worse working conditions, and is considerably more competitive to get into than a job selling office supplies.

One of the other things the grad students were demanding (which they only sort of got) was paid parental leave, because they did not fail to notice that most of their professors were in their late 30s or early 40s before they could afford to stop work long enough to start a family. It was very rare for two academics to have children together, because of the heinous, career ending financial cost to having children when you were young enough that their high school graduation date was before your expected mortality.

Not specialize in the sense of "here's your civil engineering operating system, which is different from your structural engineering operating system, and neither bear any similarity to your gaming operating system".

In context, its correct, that's not up for dispute. The question is "does it add anything to the context?" and more importantly "could a student misconstrue its inclusion as something else?"

You'd think that, being so educated on the hormonal backlash from experiencing trauma, that cops and the greater judicial system would be more forgiving of e.g. emergent hypersexuality in rape victims after experiencing a rape that Grossman calls out there. But you would be wrong, because even if Grossman wants his students to understand that concept for their own health, he wildly misunderstands the culture he helped create where the police view themselves as a thin blue line holding back the manifold forces of Chaos Undivided.

That's a man who lived his craft right there.

Yes, we have a gun violence problem. But notably, we do not have a heavy weapons problem. By and large, gun crimes are committed with guns that can be purchased legally somewhere inside the US.

So if the silver bullet to the gun violence problem is taking away all the guns (please do not misunderstand me, I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT TO BE THE CASE), then step 1 is to limit what guns can be purchased anywhere in the US.

But this whole 3d printer farse reveals something we sort of already knew: if people want to have guns (or have weapons in general), they're going to find a way. If you want to address the gun violence problem, you have to find a way to make people not want to kill, nor own guns, that's unrelated to how difficult/expensive it is to get guns. And you're going have to do that in the shadow of the constitution.

Really?! I had no idea! I had such a miniscule understanding of what portion of the threat space locks address that the second sentence in the very fucking post you're replying is this:

> Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people.

I'm so ignorant of the threat space, that the sentence immediately following that one goes:

> They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door.

I guess you're right, the two sentences I wrote 76 characters before the one you're shitting all over as evidence of my ignorance have absolutely no bearing on the context of the statement I made. They just exist entirely disconnected from any other sentences in that same post. I bow to your superior intellect and analytical skills.

Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people. They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door.

Locks are no obstacle if the intruder is willing to use social engineering. But if all they're trying to do is get into my garden shed, they're going to have to manipulate me or my spouse. Or somehow get past my dog. Meanwhile, my dog has absolutely no bearing on a bad actor getting access to my bank account. But similarly, bringing the full might of the best electronic security to bear to protect a chainsaw and a rake seems a bit excessive. And sort of beside the point, since I've not built my garden shed to withstand creation of an additional door (by e.g. a sawzall or a fireaxe).

There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"

Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.

This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.

The extreme depreciation of BMWs and Germany's loss to the Allies in WWII are both aspects of the same phenomenon; that fact is very funny to me.

Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.

All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.

The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.

I worked at company where the projects I was working on kept getting cancelled. And sure, that's business, these things happen. But couple that with also being reassigned well outside of my comfort zone or job description while they looked for something new (and all of the proposed projects that would be back in line with my job title were also getting cancelled before development could even begin), I began to see a pattern.

The final straw, such as it was, was the announcement that they could no longer purchase milk for coffee in the breakroom, in an effort to save money. It wasn't that "I can't work at a place that can't afford milk for coffee", it was "this company is so bad at planning for the future that it can't even find a way to purchase milk for the breakroom, let alone drive a massive development and manufacturing effort to completion".

I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.