Tag: Stupid people

Handing Over The Future

Education

Last week I talked about a serious young teacher quitting her job because of A.I. and how said excrescence was affecting her students.

Here’s another take on the same topic, courtesy of Insty (thankee, Squire):

“We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

Perhaps? 

From a student:

“I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

As for the teachers:

“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate, both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

“How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?”

Well, yeah.  Perhaps [gasp!]  not all kids are college material.  And I think this A.I. cheating thing is proving the point.

And then, from the teechurs:

“Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.

Of course, this whole situation is fixable — there’s always a solution to a problem of this nature — but don’t expect the current crop of teachers to figure it out.  Especially if it takes actual hard work and thought.

Small wonder their students are screwed up and hopeless.

Read the whole article.  It’s worth it.

Cry Me A River

Marxists, Politics

Via Insty:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said New York City’s proposed $1 billion cut from the police department budget tiptoes around demands from activists who are asking for a reduced police presence.

Though the plan proposed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) cuts one-sixth of the New York Police Department (NYPD) budget, activists note that much of it would be transferred to other city departments, including the Department of Education, where it could pay for police in schools. Activists have advocated for removing officers from schools altogether.

“Defunding police means defunding police,” the congresswoman said in a statement. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”

—The Hill, June 30th, 2020, at the height of left’s riot, arson, and looting season.

How it’s going: The Fruits of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Labors: A 70% increase in Violent Crime in Her District.

Last year, AOC was hoping to be named to the top spot on the powerful Oversight Committee. Pelosi blocked her ascension,  proving to AOC that moving up in the Democratic Party will be harder than she thought.

Through all of this political maneuvering to further her career, AOC has forgotten the people who got her to where she is: her long-suffering constituents. From 2019 to 2025, murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft have jumped 70%.

You might claim that a congresswoman’s actions or inactions have little to do with the crime rate. That would be true if AOC hadn’t been a prominent voice in the “Defund the Police” movement.

“The 115th Precinct, which also serves part of Roosevelt Avenue in addition to Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, and north Corona, saw major offenses rise by 85%” reports the New York Post.

Ocasio-Cortez’s district takes in two police districts that are among the worst in the city. And some residents are pointing the finger at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“She’s not doing shit. She doesn’t live in the neighborhood, she doesn’t care,” said Elmhurst resident Guadelupe Alvarez, who has lived in the neighborhood her entire life.

Here’s a quick question for “Elmhurst resident Guadelupe Alvarez”:

Did you vote for AOC in the past couple/three elections?

If you did, then you got what you wanted.

If you didn’t, then all the other people who did are also getting what they deserve*.

Vote for Commies, get government run according to Communist principles. 

Tell your sob story to someone who cares.

*Or, as H.L. Mencken once put it:  “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nobody Cares

Immigration, Religion

Much has been made of this action:

The Episcopal Church has announced it will end its decades-old partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by the Trump admin.

Don’t bother yourselves about it.

Afrikaners, in general, belong to the ultra-Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church and absolutely loathe the Church of England, a little because of that “England” bit (#BoerWar), but mostly because the CofE / Episcopalians have over the years become a bunch of screaming Commies.

So thanks but no thanks, Episcopals.

I don’t know where the newly-arrived Dutchies will choose to go to church, but it would be interesting to see what they decide.

And just to be clear, the American version of the DRC (Reform Church of America) can stop licking their lips at the thought of new members, because even they will be regarded as hopelessly liberal by the Afrikaners.

As for the Episcopals wanting to “end its decades-old partnership with the government to resettle refugees” , that’s a Good Thing because they’ve also encouraged and abetted illegal immigrants.

And that’s no longer a thing with our newly-elected Administration, thank goodness.

Speed Bump #6,325

Grammar Nazism

A twofer from the same publication, filed under “Death By SpelChek”:

“I think a lot of the established community will give the town a wide birth in the summer.”

…and:

Stevie-Sara Russell, 43, from Essex, was vivaciously beaten by her ex-partner.

There’s only one thing to do under the circumstances.

 

Simple Question, Answered

Morons & Idiots

Whenever I’m asked stupid questions involving fights or struggles against Nature, it’s always on the scale of “What chance does a man have against a Great White shark?”

…to which my reply is generally along the lines of:  “Pretty good, provided that the man is sitting in a sturdy boat with a few hand grenades.”

So it is with today’s stupid question:  “How many men would it take to win a fight against a gorilla?”

Answer:  “One, holding a 12ga. shotgun loaded with 00 buckshot.”

Let’s just remember that when it comes to this kind of thing, Man is unquestionably at the top of the food chain.  And the reason this is so is that we don’t fight with our relatively-weak bare hands or with our pathetic little teeth;  we fight with our brains, and those brains are what enabled us to create, build and use things like hand grenades and shotguns.

Give that shotgun to a gorilla, and he’d only swing it like a club — if that.

Just as we are like candy to a lion with its teeth and claws, they are like candy to us with our A-10 Warthog.

Bite on that, Fluffy.

Hell, let’s take that one step further.  If there was to be combat between a lion and a woman…

…and she didn’t even need an A-10.

Been There, Done That

Disaster, Eco-Crap, Gummint

Reader JC_In_PA sends me an article about electricity, suggesting that it’s worthy of a 10,000-word rant.  An excerpt:

In our modern age, the electric grid is the mother of all networks. Without electricity, advanced forms of transportation and communications virtually grind to a halt and nearly all digital and electronic devices are rendered practically useless. When the grid goes down, we lose conveniences like air conditioning, lighting, and other amenities that we often take for granted.

Several days ago, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France and Belgium lost power for an extended period of time, demonstrating just how devastating a total grid collapse can be to our modern way of life.

During this colossal blackout, the largest that Europe has ever experienced, more than 50 million people were left without electricity. Traffic signals did not work, creating utter chaos on the roadways. Subway systems couldn’t function, leaving people stranded far from home. Stores and businesses closed, as payments were limited to cash only. Mobile phone service was spotty, at best. Even some hospitals and medical facilities, which generally have backup generators, were left without power.

As of now, it seems that the sudden, system-wide grid collapse was caused by a malfunction at two solar power plants in southwest Spain.

And further down the page:

Now, you may be thinking that enormous, system-wide blackouts could never occur in the United States, the most prosperous nation in human history. That is not only naïve, but dangerous.

As the American Energy Alliance notes, “power outages have increased by 93 percent across the United States over the last 5 years — a time when solar and wind power have increased by 60 percent. Texas, who leads the nation in wind generation, and California, who leads the nation in solar generation, have had the largest number of power outages in the nation over those 5 years.”

Unbeknownst to many Americans, the federal government, in cahoots with state and local governments, has pushed electricity grid operators to build more solar and wind power facilities instead of dependable natural gas plants while prematurely shuttering perfectly operable coal power plants. As is almost always the case, government subsidies, loan guarantees, and tax breaks have created a skewed market in which utility companies are incentivized to build more solar and wind power plants instead of dependable and affordable coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants.

Due to this short-sighted money grab, the long-term reliability of the U.S. grid is being put in peril.

Well, I’d add my two cents to this little diatribe, but Loyal Readers will recall that I have spoken about this issue several times, to wit:  February 2021, June 2021, January 2023, November 2023, and January 2024.  (I have no idea what happened to 2022 — a mild winter, maybe — but there it is.)

Adding all that up comes to somewhat less than 10,000 words, to be sure, but I’m pretty sure that collectively, the “rant” part has been well addressed, e.g.:

We need to stop being fearful about our energy needs, toot sweet, and if the existing electricity providers are being hampered, the reasons for said hampering need to be eliminated before we start having Third World problems of rolling blackouts and “load shedding”.

And by “eliminating” I mean this: