Bay 12 Games Forum

Eh, like said, I'd be recommending involving as many different ways as possible, as early as possible. Lets you figure out what actually works for a student without forcing some to spend years slamming their head into a wall that isn't going to budge. Guess if I were doing some kind of ideal, resources and time unconsidered, I'd be splitting curriculum up, have part of the time dedicated to using and becoming familiar with a spread of methods (hand, mental, calculator enabled, spreadsheet enabled*, etc.) and the rest let the student choose two or three methods they prefer. Still probably require the use of more than one, but don't hinge most or all of a student's material on a single style, and make sure there's room for them to work and learn in a manner they're comfortable with, instead of assuming things need to be done a certain way for it to be "right".

Seen a number of times over the years where folks were insisting on pure hand written stuff for students it was very obviously massively frustrating for. Not only did they at best no learn well, often enough they didn't learn at all, or found the experience so stressful and fruitless it actively degraded their ability to engage in mathematics. Regardless of whether math needs to be taught like that, if it's not working it's not working, and it's time to try other things until something does. If missing out on some of the underlying concepts is what it takes to avoid turning someone off math entirely, methinks it's time to shove the concepts under the bus and come back later, y'know?

* Which would take a bit of work to get intuitive for younger users, but I'm pretty damn sure it's possible and being able to physically manipulate a formula and change numbers on the fly without getting (as much) human error involved can be bloody tremendously helpful. If I had had that about a decade before I did, it wouldn't have taken that decade to stop being substantially hostile to the field.

... yeah, both sides, which is why most of the dems voted yes on the regulation (they put in to begin with) repeal, and there ended up being no opposition to sopa or pipa.

Except, y'know. That didn't happen.

Just mentioned that a few posts before yours, heh. Linked to the vote itself, just in case someone happens to feel like expressing an opinion to one of the shits that voted it through.

Though yeah, flake was the sponsor. I'm pretty sure the actual meaning behind that particular bit of bullshit you quoted involved referring to ISPs as the consumer, presumably with the fucking GOP being the seller and the rest of us just being victims. Statement actually makes sense, then.

[snip]

What industry would be the question gov't agencies should be answering and policy trying to provide for. Dem platform last year talked about funding green energy stuff to come into such regions, as a singular example. It obviously wouldn't be enough on its own, but it'd be one more brick in a new foundation. Exact options depend on the situation on the ground, and many potentials would probably take government/non-profit investment to bring to the table since for-profit stuff just isn't going to bloody happen under local conditions. But you do have to actually go out and try to bloody find them instead of throwing your hands in the air and trying to shore up an industry that's already proven it can't manage what you need.

Retraining et al does indeed take time and effort, and what options are available are largely not going to be what was there before. That doesn't mean it's not what has to happen if things are going to not go to pot. It just means the GOP in particular fucked 'em by doing everything in their power to prevent the process from starting a decade or four ago, and the chicken's coming home to roost. If the situation needed tens of thousands to become a different type of laborer, we should have been working through that back when the process was going to hurt less.  We didn't and now we're here, still dealing with the same necessity but with less time before situations turn even more critical and a greater number of options cut off before they could be attempted.

What's failed the average american isn't free trade -- it's probably one of the primary catalysts, but it's not the cause -- it's our government's refusal to react to it properly and our populace's continued insistence on electing people that make sure the refusal's happening. What that means is that the only way these places are going to survive in even a diminished state is start trying to fix the bloody problem instead of claw back a yesterday that no longer can exist without things going to complete hell, and suck up their pride in the mean time and request and accept what help they need to keep them alive while they're doing it. Or these regions are going to die, at the absolute least until they contract into much smaller entities.

Lot of these areas are going to need life support regardless, and there's fuck all we can do about that at this point, unless we really are going to just let them die and to hell with the populations within. Starting the retraining processes, finding out what's needed to bring things in or figuring out where the people need to go to manage, is going to be the difference between going on life support so you can heal and indeed just ruddy giving up.

... though even if it's the latter, we can at least work to let the areas die in peace instead of forcing everyone inside them to suffer for the failures of their forefathers. It's better than what the GOP is trying to force happen.

All that said, though, even without automation looming, bringing back manufacturing isn't even an imperfect solution, just an inefficient way to attempt to stem the bleeding. It's been dead in the water so far as these regions go since the day productivity started to increase (which is basically to say since day 1), and there's sod all that can be done about that. Even trying to artificially cripple the industry's output is just going to mean people buy elsewhere, losing chunks of whatever part the market a hold was kept on. Trying to rely on an industry that just flat out doesn't need as many workers is going to do nothing but put you in worse shape than you were previously, and without any road forward to improve things. Even without technological advancements, raw methodological ones would have still been contracting that particular work force.

Domestic manufacturing is always going to be part of what we do, but it very literally can't -- physically can't, without all kinds of incredibly terrible shit happening -- be something we rely on anymore. It just doesn't friggin' work, and trying to convince communities it can is doing nothing but making sure they die and die as painfully as possible. Foreign competition isn't what's causing that (though it accelerates and exaggerates), it's just the nature of the work involved. We got too good at it, we're still getting better, and unless we start murdering everyone else that figures out how to do that, trying to roll back the clock on that front is just going to make everything about the process worse.

E: And in other news, fuck. Cheers GOP voters, yet another attempt at privacy protection struck down by the bastards you voted for. Except for those that elected the 15 that give even the intermittent appearance of a single shit about the electorate, I guess. I guess it's conceptually possible trump vetoes i- yeah, I can't even finish typing that.

Welfare, education, and investment (I assume you mean roads and bridges and such) are, as you say, only stopgaps. Certainly not a solution for more than a small few. Without actual economic activity those places are dead. They might have their needs met, but they're not producing anything. They're extra, like the farmers displaced during the early industrial revolution, except there's no factory in the city to go to this time. Manufacturing isn't going to do it like it used to, but what else is there? Producing what we need for ourselves, at least where we can, is the only useful way forward I can see in a world where American exports are becoming less and less competitive. Maybe even targetting heavy taxes to slow down the process of automatization and convincing other countries to do the same.

Nah, investment was business investment significantly more than infrastructure (though they're hand in hand to a fair degree since the latter is part of what's depressing the former for the areas in question). Subsidies to bring in new industry, tax breaks for retraining or whatev', stuff along those lines. Trying to turn insular isn't going to work, especially not to do anything but stabilize things with the areas significantly worse off or less populated. You need to incentivize economy to come to the areas in question, have working populations they're looking for and environments they can function in, so on and so forth. And if manufacturing isn't managing that you find something that will. Or start working to get your populations out of the areas that aren't going to be able to support themselves anymore, since they're no longer viable (and I'unno about you, but I care a hell of a lot more about the people around here than the rotting barns and swampland).

Like, the flat fact is that if these areas are going to not die, they have to transition. Change the nature of the work being done there, and how the population interacts with it. Localizing production isn't some kind of panacea or solution, it's intentionally strangling the size and strength of your economy, limiting it to what you can produce in that area and largely denying yourself access to all the shit elsewhere you could be leveraging to improve things. If that's your solution you've already decided to roll over and die, and what you should actually be doing is figuring out how to get your people out rather than trying to trap them under a corpse. At least that way the people that can manage to still stick around don't drag everyone else under as part of it.

Bloody hell baff, you've seen me rant on this before. No, that's not the answer. You need education, investment, welfare to make the interim and those necessarily slipping through the cracks bearable. Basically everything the GOP isn't doing and manufacturing can no longer provide to the extent the areas need it. What we don't need is fucking the rest of the country just to fuck middle america marginally slower, assuming the efforts directed by republican policy even manage that much.

Though yeah, transporting chemicals you don't know the composition of is a rather incredibly bad idea. That's how things get melted through, explode, and/or end up poisoning an indeterminate amount of people. Never move something when you don't know what its reaction to transport is.

The who is no telling, particularly without know what the chemicals are. All sorts of reasons someone might have an excess of presumably toxic waste. The how is less opaque, though. Walmart parking lots are big, usually significantly populated, and generally understaffed for something like keeping overwatch on the premises. Not hard at all to dump something off without anyone really noticing, particularly if some of the usual security cameras aren't working for whatever reason. If it's not causing actual monetary damages, it might even be cheaper to just let it slide. Occasional stopover by a chemical analyst type critter may cost less than what it'd cost to have someone keep an eye out, to say nothing of the potential issues involved with confronting someone that's been dumping chemical waste on you.