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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • I def had some weird experiences like this in school too, though not as extreme. I had a teacher once give me a zero on an exam because I used greater than and less than symbols to describe two lines intersecting. She thought I did them all backwards. Normally I’d be too shy to push back but zero on an exam was pretty extreme so I went to discuss one on one and she basically called me dumb saying I don’t know how the symbols worked (this was like 9th grade, I def did and was pretty alarmed she didn’t). Finally she said fine, she’ll go ask a math teacher to come explain to me in front of the class if I’m so smart. She left, was gone for like ten minutes, and came back super upset. Slams the paper on my desk in front of everyone and says something like ‘fine I guess you want an A now?’. Was traumatizing. But was actually a huge teaching moment for me in that I stopped seeing teachers as things/concepts, and started seeing them as people. Same as me/my classmates/some random on the street. No one has this shit figured out. I also realized I never wanted the experience she just had, and learned to always hedge my opinions. It looks like, I think, it seems to me, etc. Has saved me from looking stupid but also encouraged those that I teach to question my dumb shit. But yeah. Teachers are just people, have you met people?

    Side note my math teacher was extra nice to me that afternoon - I also learned that the teachers don’t necessarily like each other either. Apparently I had helped score points for the ‘not batshit insane’ crew



  • Crazy inefficiencies is why not. If you’ve ever worked a large infrastructure or construction project you’d see why this doesn’t work. There are advantages of scale. A single company being able to handle the land acquisition, and all engineering alone for a large project is going to be like 10000 people, and that’s without construction. If I had to work with 15 other companies to get a thing built I’ll tell you right now that things never gonna get built. Big companies aren’t the problem, small ownership is the problem. Employee owned (socialist) companies are the solution. It’s not about not scaling, it’s about ensuring that the workers own the means of production. If you want renewable energy, high speed rail, and sustainable district engineering we need to leverage economies of scale. It’s just that we need to set up economic systems that distribute the profits to those doing the work.