Canadas family doctors apparently have the shortest residency in the world.

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.

The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.

I’m having a hard time parsing your sentence. Who is the “they” in the main clause?

You make it sound like the American left pushes a lot of symbolic issues. Which ones are you thinking of?

Hot take: the American left loses on the material issues because it has lost on solidarity, symbolism, ideology. Don’t you know that healthcare and vacation days will “hurt the economy”? There are many poor working class people who still oppose Obamacare even though they directly benefit from it. The material gains matter a lot less if people reject the ideas behind them.

I’m not sure if the timing of Labor Day is important, but I wouldn’t underestimate the power of symbols.

I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn’t address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.

I feel like we’re getting old. Is this our “kids these day can’t even change their own oil” moment?

I was curious about this topic, so I looked it up and found this Atlantic article.

It begins:

if the purpose of academic grading is to communicate accurate and specific information about learning, letter, or points-based grades, are a woefully blunt and inadequate instrument. Worse, points-based grading undermines learning and creativity, rewards cheating, damages students’ peer relationships and trust in their teachers, encourages students to avoid challenging work, and teaches students to value grades over knowledge.

Also, to clear up a possible misunderstanding (that I had and others may have), getting rid of letter grades does not mean getting rid of evaluation. Instead, students are assessed on whether they are achieving/not achieving proficiency in specific skills.