Heh, my thought on opening the article and seeing the image was "huh, without the badge in the photo, if forced to guess the make, I'd have gone with Kia."

The answers are in the question.

[edit] but really, I was like “man, I feel like there’s another one…” but figured I must have just been thinking of the never-made sequel that got as far as some planning (Van Buren).

I’m kinda that way with Elder Scrolls. My first one was III (Morrowind) and I’ve still never played the first two.

What happens a lot:

1) Someone (a researcher, usually) comes in and tries some radical new program in some school.

2) (sometimes) It works! It works great, in fact.

3) This new system or approach or framework gets publicized. This may include dissemination through academic channels, but also (and especially if it's really going to take off) through a kind of reform-grifting network that turns the whole thing into a bunch of stuff that can be sold, for actual money (training, materials, consultants). Turns out being an education researcher pays dick-all, but selling a "system" pays real cash dollars—for many researchers, admin, and curriculum-design folks, getting a windfall from being part of one of these is their most promising path to "making it" before they're old.

4) Some districts adopt the new thing, often with initial pilot programs. Some spend a lot of money doing it.

5) Few of them spend much time considering whether there are material differences between their schools and the one(s) where the system was proven (the experimental program was proven in a troubled inner city school? Surely our middling suburban school can expect similar improvements!). Expertise of and authority granted to the person or persons implementing the system also isn't considered as a factor (one or both are usually lacking, compared with the case or cases on which the promise of the system is judged).

(My personal "here's what to do if you want to fix schools" is "fix our justice/corrections system, worker protections, healthcare, and our social safety net". I think the biggest improvements to our schools would be found there. It's all stuff outside schools. That's why we keep struggling to make headway by monkeying around with schools themselves. It's why more money for schools doesn't help much. That the US finds it basically impossible to do anything constructive about any of those problems is... a sign we can expect not to see any huge across-the-board positive changes in US public school performance any time soon, I reckon)

Meanwhile, within and among districts, individual schools do pilot new programs, et c. All this stuff happens. Does it always happen with everything that turns into a broader reform? No, not always. Is this kind of activity constant, and common, in schools? Absolutely. Frankly it happens way too much (because people are desperate and flailing around to find a path to improvement through school reform, but see above about why I think they are doomed to remain desperate). There's an absolute shitload of process and curriculum churn in schools.

Consider also that while all the above is going on, you have the usual incompetence and principal agent problems you see in any organization. Important tasks are handed to the person an assistant superintendent's having an affair with (god, so common) for whom they invented a paid position. Systems are picked apart and bits adopted piecemeal while ones admin find too uncomfortable or scary are dropped up-front without even trying them, while anyone used to analyzing systems like this can see that the parts their dropping support and are necessary for the success of the parts they're keeping, dooming the reform before it's even implemented. Empire-building happens. Things get hijacked for personal gain. Powerful folks' own inept efforts at breaking into the reform-grift industry get pushed on those under them, as they try to get their own success story to sell. Superintendents or principals fall for obvious bullshit at one of their drinking-and-driving retreats er I mean conferences, because frankly most of them are kinda dumb, and then a whole district gets to suffer for a couple years. Et cetera. Same crap you see in big corporations.

But! Despite all that, lots of people are out there running experiments and reform pilot programs just as you suggest, and for the right reasons, and sometimes even competently. It's just that as soon as it goes past that, it tends to get caught up in all the above. However, even the best-considered reforms that show promise in early experiments and trials are rarely broadly-applicable enough, and familiar enough, and simple enough, and easy enough, and effective enough, to survive that process of wider application without being destroyed. Plus (to repeat, and IMO) I just don't think there are many big wins to be had with educational reform on its own, without working on things outside schools that are resulting in lots of hard-to-educate-in-a-classroom kids.

Every now and then, though, you get a really solid improvement, like, "hey that Whole Language thing that sure seemed to a lot of us to be backwards-ass garbage that really looked like it was making kids worse readers, in-fact, whatever its proponents claimed? Yeah, turns out it is backwards-ass garbage, we can improve reading markedly by knocking that off". (see process and systemic pitfalls outlined above for how it ended up widely in-use in the first place)

People from cosmopolitan well-educated world traveler tech-connected circles are common on HN, but are extreme outliers. I would agree that the overwhelming majority of those sorts are aware of it. The general public? No.

It's true that many don't want anyone (or certain anyones) to come in at all and are saying those kinds of things as a deflection or smokescreen, but plenty of others saying "they should just come in legally" don't realize what a feat they're demanding. They don't know what any immigration process anywhere looks like, in the US or elsewhere. They don't know what ours has been like in the past, either, at all (in fact I bet many think it's been trending less strict and difficult over time, which, LOL). But they're still comfortable suggesting people should simply find a legal route to come in (while, again, having no idea what that actually means).

So?

> And if-then statements are functorial.

So?

All the "this is hard" stuff around these ideas seems to focus on managing to explain what these things are but I found that to progress at the speed of reading (so, about as easy as anything can be) once it occurred to me to find explanations that used examples in languages I was familiar with, instead of Haskell or Haskell-inspired pseudocode.

What I came out the other side of this with was: OK, I see what these are (that's incredibly simple, it turns out) and I even see how these ideas would be useful in Haskell and some similar languages, because they solve problems with and help one communicate about problems particular to those languages. I do not see why it matters for... anything else, unless I were to go out of my way to find reasons to apply these ideas (and why would I do that? And no, I don't find "to make your code more purely-functional" a compelling reason, I'm entirely fine with code I touch only selectively, sometimes engaging with or in any of that sort of thing).

The "so?" is the part I found (and find) hard.

Clarke wrote good stories. Asimov had some good ideas but was a fairly poor writer of fiction (his characters and dialog, in particular, are rarely better than terrible, and many of his stories hinge on a single gee-what-if shower thought and have little more going for them) and is in my estimation easily the weakest of the three.

Bradbury… is good good. He had a combo of talent and a mind to put it to a certain kind of use, some (or many) elements of which the other two did not possess. I would unhesitatingly recommend Bradbury to a literary fiction reader who’s not much on genre fiction for its own sake, and might not even bother to suggest where they start. I would selectively recommend bits of Clarke’s work where he’s treading a bit closer to the sublime than usual, or some of his short stories that are at least competent, fun short reads with some ideas or imagery or the odd line that sticks with you. I might not recommend any Asimov at all.

Some authors are good, no italics. Bradbury is good.

I later leaned on the Web version of the factbook quite a bit for basic country stats in undergrad.

I don’t know of a replacement of comparable quality. Damn good resource. Not that you can necessarily trust a government source, and especially one from an intelligence agency, but most of what it covered wasn’t exactly useful for the kind of propaganda you’d expect the US government to push, so you could expect it to broadly be a sincere attempt at describing reality (it didn’t hurt that it wasn’t a super-widely-known resource outside certain academic disciplines, so lying about e.g. the major exports of Guyana or whatever wouldn’t have much effect anyway, lowering the likelihood that anyone would bother)

Much of the rest is people who exclusively read very easy books from one or two genres (“romance”, true crime, airport thriller/mystery, young-adult fantasy, and self-help/business-guru, mostly). That’s especially going to dominate the shelves of the set of folks with books-read counts far higher than one per year. Whether that crowd counts much toward a measure of the exercise of quality, general literacy, is a judgement call, but those readers are the engine of what little remains of the market for new books.

(There’s a niche market that’s commercially viable that involves books laser-focused at being optioned for TV or movies, but it’s as cliquish as you’d expect and hard to break into, and of course other genres still support a tiny number of super-stars)

A seat that is likely to flip is probably going to be a relatively close race.

There are a bunch of public and private sources you can use, and databases both parties have already compiled, to find out which polling places are likely to be overwhelmingly visited by one party's voters over the other.

A majority of one in the House, and a tie in the Senate, is all the White House needs to mostly prevent Congress from messing with them much (though larger margins are better).

Combine all these facts and they have more than enough ICE agents to have a huge effect on the outcomes. They only need to show up in a handful of specific places to completely change the course of the next couple years.

This isn't a crazy or impossible proposition, it can be done with just a law. We already form some courts in a similar way, so it's also not unprecedented. It even avoids the naked partisanship of a simple court-packing.

As far as I can tell, nobody who matters is talking about it yet. So. Hope is... remote.

I also expect:

1) Lawsuits, subpoenas, and indictments against and of elections offices and key officials in Democratic areas of vulnerable Republican districts, timed to mess with their ability to even function. If it suppresses the vote that's a "nice to have" but mostly this is to sow uncertainty about the elections both by generating ginned-up headlines (it doesn't matter if the investigations actually find anything or go anywhere) and by delaying vote counting and causing chaos (e.g. very long lines) on Election Day, which opens up greater space for the GOP to act after the elections.

2) Challenges of the outcomes by the administration and their proxies, and outright calls for Republicans to pull certification tricks akin to the fake-elector crime they attempted in '20. This would be supported by #1, and by ICE-created chaos and vote suppression.

Incidentally, the ICE intervention can take many forms, the most extreme of which (and most effective to the admin) is triggering violence (a lot of people are going to react poorly to being asked "papers, please" by a small squad of armed & armored federal thugs on the way to vote) that actually shuts down polling places in key locations. This both heavily suppresses the vote in areas they've targeted, and serves their "chaos! Democrats are trying to cheat by letting illegals vote! See how much they freak out when we don't let them?" narrative. The lighter version is some cautious shows-of-force and unrealized threats ahead of time, aimed at gentler levels of vote suppression (if you're a citizen but have an accent and aren't white, you might think twice about your odds of getting to the polls without getting locked up for a day or two and losing perhaps five figures you may not have attaining your release, and just stay home, even if ICE ends up not showing or just doing some show-of-force drive-bys that end up all over social media)

I'd love to know what, if anything, state governments are planning to prevent any of this. I've personally not been able to think of a single effective thing they can do about it as far as actually keeping it from happening or recovering quickly from the material harm it does (winning much later in the court of public opinion, for whatever that's worth, is another matter, as is eventually winning in court) but maybe there's something.

(I rate all the above fairly likely, in some form; my outside-but-not-impossible-odds guess is they'll seize some ballot drop boxes or enroute mail-in ballots with nebulous claims of wrongdoing that don't go anywhere but do fuck up specific districts' voting processes, with, as usual, no relief from the courts because by the time anything can be done about it it's a fait accompli and nobody's gonna trust those ballots after the feds have had them, anyway)