I’m just sitting here talking to myself and thinking how easy it is to critique someone’s work than it is to do the actual work. Writing a book is a lot harder than reading a book, but criticizing a book is a lot easier than readng it. Enjoying a good movie or video is a lot easier than making it. Editing a book is harder than reading it. I am learning that getting an idea to write a book is a lot easier than writing a book. In my current work, I got a single idea of what I wanted a story to be about, but developing that idea into a full fledged story is another matter. An idea can sometimes be expressed in a few words or sentences, but developing that same idea and expanding it into a hundred thousand word story becomes work.
I enjoy a good story with solid characters and a good plot. In my story, I’m not sure I am doing enough to develop strong characters, and the plot seems to be weak. When writing, the principal thing to remember is to show the story and not tell the story. I am great at telling stories but weak at showing them. In fact, it took me a long time to know the difference between the two. By the time I learn that difference and apply it to my writing, I’m afraid my body clock will have worn out.
I often wonder how many books being written actually get published and how many of those that get published make money. What I do know is that the time I spend on writing a post or a story that it really isn’t worth the effort in income production. If I stood on a street corner holding a sign saying, “Please help a starving writer,” I think I would make more money than I would if I had published a book.
Even with all the ways I can think of to avoid wasting my time writing, I am determined to complete the work and send it off to a publisher. One way to tell if your time was worth it is if it is actually published. The second way is to make money on it. If you make some money, it is the measure of the story’s success.
If my book is published and it does make some money, then maybe, I can retire from being retired.
Those who know me understand that I have a negative view of teacher’s unions. I have never been a teacher, nor have I attended a school that was run by a union. Regardless, I hate unions in general. When it comes to student outcomes, I especially dislike Teacher Unions.
The article below is taken from the BLOG “Sultan Knish the Journalism of Daniel Greenfield.”
Once again, Greenfield exposes the facts that support my own feelings.
The More Powerful the Teachers Union, the less the Children Learned
The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.
But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.
During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.
Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.
And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”
The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.
The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.
And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.
And therefore for the “systemic racism” that they had selfishly brought into being.
Previous figures showed a “larger score gap between white and black students nationally—from 25 points in 2020 to 33 points in 2022.” Fourth grade math scores fell twice as much for black and Hispanic students as for white students. While we already knew that minority students fell back further during the pandemic, the new numbers compare the schools that stayed open and those that closed in order to pander to teachers union members who refused to come to work.
“More time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores,” the Times analysis showed. “Students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.”
The media had accused Georgia, Florida and other states that opened up of conducting experiments in “human sacrifice”. The actual human sacrifice was carried out by Democrats and their educational establishment which brought up children as human sacrifices to the unions.
Teachers unions waged a relentless and ruthless war to close schools and keep them closed.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten called reopening schools “reckless, callous, cruel”. Union members protested, threatened, sued and even physically blocked schools from reopening. The teachers unions won while students and parents lost.
Rep. Aaron Bean noted that “school districts with lengthier collective bargaining agreements were less likely to start the fall 2020 semester with in-person instruction.” Surveys found that the more powerful the teachers unions were, the more likely schools were to stay closed.
And therefore, the more powerful the teachers union, the less the children learned.
Teachers unions chose not to work and they leveraged school reopenings to extract personal and political benefits without paying any price for it. That is true of the lockdown advocates nearly across the board, but the teachers unions emerged politically stronger than ever from the educational disaster they had helped to cause. Strikes, slowdowns and elections made them wealthier and more powerful. And they continue to grow more powerful every year.
As late as 2022, 73% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted not to come to work while claiming that COVID-19 was still too dangerous. A year later, CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected as the 57th mayor of Chicago.
What happened during the pandemic was not a unique event, it just accelerated the current state of affairs in which teachers unions have wielded their political power to demand more money for less work while dismantling all the basic standards of the educational system.
According to teachers unions, the ideal educational system has no test scores and no expectations but that students be taught to parrot the politics of their teachers.
The price for the dismantling of the educational system by the educators, during the pandemic or the rest of the time, is being paid by students. Especially poor and minority students.
Teachers unions claim that they advocate for students and that when they wield power, they do so to improve educational outcomes. The data, not only during the pandemic, proves otherwise.
In 1960, the American Federation of Teachers had a mere 60,000 members. Today it’s 1.7 million. And students are less capable of reading, study less and know less than their peers in 1960, but receive much higher grades than they did 60 years ago.
What has improved in schools since 1960 are the teacher salaries, by “45 percent in real terms”, so that teachers union members, like other government workers, are outperforming the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
The growth of the teachers unions has been great for teachers, but terrible for students.
The pandemic brought home the consequences to many parents and the years since convinced many that the public school system, fatally corrupted by teachers unions, is incapable of reform. That’s why movements such as homeschooling and school choice continue to grow, not just for the stereotypical conservatives, but for a spectrum of parents, many of them minorities.
Restoring public education will require many reforms, but the most fundamental of these will be ending the death grip that the teachers unions have over the nation’s students.
In the attached video, an experiment is carried out with a small 1.5V lithium battery cell. Take a good look at the state of the container that contained the water!
In an electric car, all the batteries represent 400 volts direct current and weigh a minimum of 180 kg. (396 Lbs) It’s in English but the images are enough to explain the phenomenon. Lithium mixed with water explodes and releases enormous intensity of heat. This is why firefighters can’t put out a fire on an electric car! Some public garages do not allow EV to park.
People who own electric cars, are you aware that you are sitting on a potential bomb? I’m sure you will argue that your car batteries are safely encased in a something that is water proof. However, the propensity for unexplained electric car fires implies that if the battery case is leaky and water penetrates the lithium inside, you may have a giant, uncontrollable fire under your ass.
How many thoughts does a person have during one day?
Google says:
Every day, our minds are flooded with a constant stream of thoughts, ranging from mundane daily tasks to deeper contemplations about life and the world around us. According to research, the average person has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day.
Thatquestion is currently on my mind, but why? I have no clue why, but it occurs to me that with 8 billion people on planet Earth, there is a lot of thinking going on. Imagine if this thing called Artificial Intelligence (AI) could harness all the thinking going on worldwide. Would the genie in the computer be able to bring about world peace? Or cure all sicknesses? Indeed, that would be a dream come true. Perhaps someday we will build a computer with enough memory to accomplish feats like the ones mentioned. What if scientists discovered a way to link all human brains together to preclude the need to build a computer large enough to hold all the thoughts in the world? That might be easier to accomplish than trying to make something that is mechanical into which every human’s brain content could be transferred. Think about the loss of thought that would occur the day after the first brain dump occurred, and today humanity has a new set of thoughts.
Maybe the tequila over ice I drank last evening planted this conversation in my mind. Or, perhaps it is the fact that I spent an hour reading about AI yesterday to understand just how and why AI is so dangerous. Actually, what I learned is that AI will not take over the world by itself like a god but will be used as a tool to help people do their jobs. As I write this, I am using AI in the form of Grammarly to correct my lousy punctuation and grammar. What I am learning is that Grammarly has a writing style that is unlike my own, and I don’t like the changes it suggests about seventy percent of the time. I like to use extra words using my street vocabulary to inject my personality into a piece, but AI chooses to eliminate many of my adjectives for the purpose of making the writing clearer.
Eventually, AI will indeed take over the world and cause many people pain, just as every social revolution has in the past. People will lose their current jobs and will need to adapt to make a living. Or, they will beg and plead with the government to throw them a safety net in some form of a handout to save them from looking for new work. It isn’t going to be pretty, and I am glad it will not affect me. I will, however, be affected by the suffering I will see. As a Lion, it will afford me many new opportunities to serve my community. For every negative, there is a positive. Will we be smart enough to identify the opportunities, or will we need AI to do it for us? And if we do have to use AI to find the opportunities, so what? Isn’t that why AI has been invented in the first place?
It would be interesting to know how many internet users are criminals. The constant need to invent passwords that are long enough and complicated enough to deter thieves is tiring and unproductive. Even with all the password managers that have been provided to help bypass this problem I seem to suffer from an inability to use them, understand them, and I cannot get the logic in my head that will help me solve the problem.
It may be just me, but since the New Year rolled over, many of the websites I frequent, even my own, require logging in with passwords. I thought I was in the clear when the new Mac I bought featured a touch control for passwords. Even though I like the feature, all it seems to protect me from is me. Over the past fifteen years I have invented hundreds of passwords of complexity that makes them hard to remember, and easy to mis-type. One of the biggest problems I encounter these days is a secure site that tells me it is time to change my password. Then, when I want to use a password I’ve used before to make it easy for me, it tells me that it won’t accept it because it has been used before. In my password manager, I have as many as a dozen passwords for the same user name, all because of the incessant need for using passwords that thieves cannot break. I fully understand the need for passwords that are long, complicated, and impossible to remember in order to take more time for a computer to read and discover the key. Even thieves have rules regarding what is worth the time and what is not. All the banter about artificial intelligence is making me wonder if AI will be smart enough to learn passwords easily. If AI can do that we are screwed. No one will be secure from hackers who use AI.
Even with the rapid advancement of computer development, we are still in the stone age of security. If human development is a model, it will be hundreds or even thousands of years before this problem is resolved. All the benefits we accrue by using the internet will be offset by the loss of energy being expended fighting off hackers.
At this point, I have only one solution for reducing the need for passwords: don’t use or visit the internet.
