robertreich:

For 50 years, the median wage of hourly workers stagnated or declined while the stock market and CEO pay skyrocketed.

Is it any wonder so many feel abandoned by the system? People lose faith, and a demagogue fills the void.

This is why we must fix the system.

manicali:

writterings:

how i’m handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don’t accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don’t know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they “wrote” the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like “certainly! here’s an essay about….”

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don’t, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.

Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.

bundibird:

bundibird:

what generation do you fall into?

silent gen (1928-1945)

baby boomer (1946-1964)

gen x (1965-1980)

gen y/millennial (1981-1996)

gen z/iGen (1997-2010)

gen alpha (2010-2024)

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)

Well colour me surprised by the results so far. We have so many jokes on here about the user base aging, and I have so many friends on here who range in age from 30s to 50s, AND there are enough posts on here from people with tween/teen kids that I am genuinely surprised the older gens don’t have a higher percentage here. I really thought there were way more gen x-ers on here than there seems to be????? Apparently not

You write thorough analyses of concepts and events, so I thought I would ask for your take on Senator Booker’s speech today. Some people say it was disrespectful. What do you think? Thank you in advance for your opinion.

fozmeadows:

I think what Booker did was extraordinary on several levels. First, the sheer physical endurance it takes to speak for that long, almost uninterrupted, while remaining cogent, is absolutely incredible. Second, the actual content of what he said, based on what I’ve seen, was fantastic; he was impassioned, engaging and incisive, and the extent to which he kept on topic over that many hours is staggering. Third, the fact that he broke the record for the longest speech on the Senate floor, which is not only an achievement in its own right, but doubly meaningful given his status as a Black man when the previous record was set by a segregationist, Strom Thurmond, protesting the Civil Rights Act in 1957. And last but not least, the moral clarity inherent in rebuking, loudly and at length, the myriad abuses of a historically corrupt, fascist government while working to delay their business.

All that being so, I think there are only three plausible reasons for someone finding Booker’s speech disrespectful. The first is predicated on agreeing so completely with the Trump administration’s policies that disrupting their operation via a lawful, established form of political protest is cast as inherently bad – which would be very much in keeping with the logic of those who, to take just one example, see nothing illegal or indeed remarkable about Trump’s insistence that the executive branch should be able to unilaterally overrule both the Senate and the judiciary. The second is predicated on being such a spineless appeasenik milquetoast that some nebulous concept of “civility” is considered more important, and thus more urgent, than doing literally anything to protest an administration so nakedly corrupt that the president is publicly shilling for crypto and Tesla in order to line his own pockets. And the third is, simply, racism, whether subconscious or overt, which here translates to the reflexive assumption that a Black man being loud and disruptive must of course be inherently bad, and certainly a worse offense than whatever he might be protesting.

So, in conclusion, no, I do not think Booker’s speech was disrespectful – but even if it could be fairly labelled as such, as I don’t believe this current administration is remotely deserving of anyone’s respect, I’d still be cheering him on.

nightmaretour:

I keep seeing people put accommodations for people with epilepsy on the same level as sensory accommodations for autism and like… no??? Obviously both are important but epilepsy can kill people, SUDEP is a thing. If you expose someone with photosensitive epilepsy to strobing lights they could suffer permanent brain damage or die. Epilepsy is a condition with physical, sometimes deadly consequences. I’m not sure how many different ways I need to say this before it sticks, but epileptic seizures are physical neurological phenomena that can cause lasting neurological damage or death. Epilepsy can kill you. You can die from epilepsy.