wjrii

Yes, I’ve lived in the DFW area for over twenty years. It’s home, for better or (lately) for worse. Still, I don’t think any place is hopeless, and even today in Texas there are four blue voters for every 5 red ones. We just need more Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Willie Nelson, and fewer of these Christofascist assholes.

They also don’t realize that there’s a reason Abbott had to spend millions of Wilkes and Dunn’s money to primary a bunch of Republicans in the boonies. Those Friday Night Lights rural school districts, the ones that provide any sense of place, any average-paying jobs, and any excuse to go ahead and raise your kids in BFE, those are the first ones that will get ground into nothingness by the path envisioned for vouchers and ending recapture, which the rich suburban districts want.

Of course, that frees up more land for datacenters and fracking, so…

This is pretty much it.

The 2021 freeze still looms large in people’s minds, so while the grid actually has seemed to be hanging on better in Summer and Winter, things that threaten the still-isolated power supply draw attention. Then, Oracle/OpenAI set the precedent with Stargate in Abilene that you just stand these things up in the middle of nowhere because of cheap land and easy regulatory capture of the local politicians. The evolution of municipal governance in Texas also meant that the metro areas have fairly small core cities densely surrounded by independent municipalities, which often means that the tech companies can push that model into somewhat more densely packed areas, though it’s still often the exurbs (though not always… stupid Dallas city government). That means it’s the reddest parts of the state that are seeing them spring up and fuck the residents’ personal quality of life badly enough that they actually complain. There’s a big emphasis on the “M” part of NIMBY for them (because isn’t there always?) but the fact remains that no one else in the state has a big enough “BY.”

Very few of these people are ready to bail on single-party state government because they still buy the line that everything is regulatory hell and woke BS anywhere but God’s Own Property Texas, but if they see the state completely ignore them the one time they politely ask the republicans to not fuck them quite so roughly, then it’s going to be easier to stay home during the midterms. This is particularly problematic in a year when the Dems found a candidate with a pulse but who likes the Bible and looks like a Republican, and the Republicans are stuck with their primary voters’ pick, an asshole who is as corrupt as Trump but lacks even that weird sheen of “I’m your asshole” that Trump gives off to his base. Also, and this is shallow, when you’re the party that tries to project strength and vitality, having a ticket that consists of a droopy-eyed slug and a paraplegic in a wheelchair is something you have to figure out how to downplay.

Worst part of it is that they’re probably still gonna win. A little part of me hopes this is the year, but mostly I’m just hoping it’s close enough to drag out the spending and fuck the GOP’s budget in Maine and elsewhere.

Their books are on these devices. They don’t have physical books anymore.

Frankly, probably the best part about them, potential eyestrain notwithstanding. Having a sack of bricks strapped to your back all day, or constant retreats to a locker, wasn’t contributing to my quality of education, LOL. Having an electronic device as a reading and writing and proctoring tool, sensibly extended with the bare minimum of other capabilities, is not a bad thing at all, IMHO.

(goes back to No Child)

In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different “customers”. The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

Then, to make sure we didn’t fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same “University” paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn’t do anything “real.”

The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There’s genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.

My github is just a clusterfuck of improperly documented keyboard firmwares, but it now also contains fork of bitchat. Performative, maybe, but kinda feels right. And if they all get taken down, maybe I need a codeberg account and the zip file I also saved.