I'll be surprised if I find out EOs have any authority outside the executive branch of the federal government. Otherwise a presnit could just unilaterally ban abortion, change federal, state, and locals laws and tax rates, disband Congress...

So join ANTIFAI - anti-f*-ai.

Though it might get you labeled as a ter'ist. Especially if you don't buy the products they're pushing.

As John Taylor Gatto suggests in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher": https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.informationliberat...
        " ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
        Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
        With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
      All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith."

So most teachers earn their money doing well what it is teachers are supposed to do (as planned in Prussia in the 1800s when compulsory schooling was introduced to make Prussia a military power).
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fodyssey-fm.com%2Fwhy-sch...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmetropolis.cafe%2F2017%2F0...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdukereportbooks.com%2Fbo...
        "The Prussian Blueprint
        In tracing the roots of American education, Gatto illuminates the foundational influence of Prussian schooling. In 19th-century Prussia, the state constructed a comprehensive education system to mold loyal, obedient subjects. The purpose was explicit: to instill uniformity, suppress individuality, and ensure that children would grow into citizens who followed orders. America adopted this model eagerly, not because it worked educationally, but because it aligned with elite interests.
        This importation was neither organic nor public-driven. It was orchestrated by a coalition of industrialists, politicians, and academic theorists who viewed schooling as a tool to engineer society. They believed in planned progress and social stability, achieved not through democratic participation but through controlled upbringing."

So, the big -- and usually unacknowledged -- issue is that what teachers (and schools) are supposed to do (turn kids into obedient dumbed-down low-initiative robots for industry and warfare cannot fodder) is no longer something our society needs (if it ever did) or wants.

Until people accept compulsory schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and are doing it very well, it is hard to have a productive discussion about changing -- or abolishing -- them. And likewise, it is hard to have a productive discussion about how educational computing should be used in schools when compulsory schooling has very little to do with education.

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

As I suggested in 2008 in "Post-Scarcity Princeton":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Freading...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?"

AI is just one more aspect of that trend of post-scarcity technological change, as (AI-based) one-on-one tutoring is now cheap (or effectively free if you are paying for AI access for other reasons).

Indeed, educational videos on-demand to reflect current interests and needs via YouTube or elsewhere are another example of how compulsory schooling is increasingly obsolete.

Thanks for the Alfie Kohn link. He is an amazing insightful compassionate writer whose words have shaped some of my beliefs. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, and Grace Llewelyn are some other writers who have shaped my beliefs on education -- as are stories from sci-fi writers like James P. Hogan (e.g. "Voyage from Yesteryear"), R.A. Lafferty ("Primary Education of the Camiroi"), and Ursula K. Le Guin ("Always Coming Home", "A Wizard of Earthsea") and others.

Almost everything has pros and cons, and it is true that free schools or progressive schools have some benefits. Sadly, as I wrote here circa 2009:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Ftowards...
        "See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to [school as] prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be imprisoned [as a truant]. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling instead of napalm."

One reason given for sending a child to compulsory school is so they will be around kids their own age -- ignoring that the only reason there are not kids their own age around during the weekday is precisely because of compulsory school (and even on weekends there is homework and then making up for missed family time during the week due to schooling which tend to keep kids indoors).

As a former high school debater, I especially like this point by Aife Kohn on the dark side of debate training from the page you linked to:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...
        "Kohn: I grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, a very odd place, where the median age was deceased. I went to a large public high school, which was an intellectual wasteland. I didn't do sports. I had elements of competitiveness to be sure - in punning, for example. But in high school I was a nationally ranked debater. And although I was winning and liking it, it took me years to unlearn the poisonous messages I was taught: that any argument can be successfully defended if you're clever enough. And that winning is what counts most. I still describe myself today as a recovering debater. Sports carries with it its own set of problems, but competition is not limited to that. So when people say we need academic awards, debates, science competitions, and national spelling bees, what I hear them saying is, "Well, we destroy the athletes by turning their lives into an attempt to defeat everyone in sight - why shouldn't we do that to everyone else, too?""

And from the end:
        "Thuermer: If you had to reinvent yourself tomorrow, Alfie, what would you do?
        Kohn: I think if my career takes a turn in the next ten years, it's likely that I'll be thinking about raising kids and helping parents rethink the tendency to treat kids like pets. People have come up with cleverer ways of getting compliance - getting the kids to do what the parents want - as opposed to helping kids become responsible, caring, reflective people who can make decisions, who are socially skilled. Now that I'm a parent, this is increasingly an issue for me. A lot of it just deals with the fundamental lack of respect for children in this culture."

I quoted Alfie Kohn here (in 2008) from his "No Contest: The Case Against Competition" book in "Post-Scarcity Princeton" critiquing Princeton University and suggesting how that institution could improve:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Freading...
        "[Alfie Kohn's words:] If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities. ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"

They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.

Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.

as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
        https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
          But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
          That is not all technology has been asked to do in schools. It has been invited into the classroom in other ways, including educational simulations, Lego/Logo, web browsing, robotics, and computer-linked data collection from sensors. But assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that *matters*, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These "learning on demand" or "hands on learning" activities have been kept in their boxes so to speak (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). Or to recall from my own pre-computer elementary school experiences in the 1960s, there was a big fancy expensive "science kit" in the classroom closet -- but there was little time to use it or explore it -- we were too busy sitting at our desks. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [as John Taylor Gatto has suggested] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
        However, over the past 150 years or so the world has changed, and we have entered a post-industrial information age, with cheaply copied songs and perhaps soon cheaply copied material goods in nanotech replicators. ...
        Industry still matters of course, but only now in the sense that agricultural still matters, where an ever smaller part of the population is concerned directly with it, as innovation after innovation makes people in those fields ever more productive. If only a small percent of the people in the economy produce food, and now only an ever shrinking part of the population produces material goods, what is left for the rest to do? ...
        So, [as Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech pointed out] employment in conventional research is closed for most people [even with PhDs, due to funding issues]. Still, if you look at, say, the field of biology, there are endless opportunities for people to research millions of species of organisms and their biochemistry, ecology, and history. If you look at astrophysics, there are endless stars and solar systems to study. If you look at medicine, there is a vast amount we do not know, especially for chronic diseases of poor people. If you look at music, there are endless opportunities for people to make songs about their specific lives and families. If you look at writing, endless novels yet to be written. And if you look at programming, there is even a vast enjoyment to be had reinventing the wheel -- another programming language, another operating system, another application -- just for the fun of doing it for its own sake. The world wide web -- from blogs to you tube to garage bands -- is full of content people made and published just because they wanted to. It is an infinite universe we live in, and would take an infinite time to fill it up. However, there is practically no one willing to pay for those activities, so they are for the most part hobbies, or at best, "loss leaders" or "training" in business. And, as always, there is the endless demands of essentially volunteer parenting to invest in a future generation. And there are huge demands for community service to help less fortunate neighbors. So there are plenty of things that need doing -- even if they do not mesh well with our current economic system based around "work" performed within a bureaucracy, carefully reduced to measurable numbers (parts produced, lines of code generated, number of words written) producing rewards based on ration units (dollars).
        But then, with so much produced for so little effort, perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
        But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        Granted if people want to send kids to a prison-like facility each day for security or babysitting, then the "free school" model makes a lot of sense for that ... and is much more compatible with democratic traditions than compulsory schools (and is even cheaper to run). And the kids and teachers are generally happier in "free schools" where they have to show up but can otherwise then spend their time as they like; and such schools also do well with "discipline problem" type kids. Just ask any teacher how much happier they would be if only the kids in their classes were the ones who wanted to be there. However, there are alternatives to "free schools" as well, but requiring more parental involvement [like unschooling]...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

They tried to do Jesus, but passengers kept calling security about a hippy boarding the plane.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkpmg.com%2Fph%2Fen%2Fhome%2Fin...
"The short answer is that the Tax Code enforces a Stock Transaction Tax (STT) on every sale, barter or exchange of shares in a listed company. Under Section 127(A) of the Tax Code, as amended by the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law, the STT rate is 6/10 of 1% based on the gross selling price or gross value in money of the shares of stock sold, bartered, exchanged or otherwise disposed.
      The burden to pay the STT, as provided in Revenue Regulations (RR) No. 6-08, is imposed on the seller or transferor and remitted by the seller or transferor's broker. The stockbroker who effected the sale has the duty to collect the tax from the seller upon issuance of the confirmation of sale, issue the corresponding receipt thereof, and remit the same to the tax authorities. "

Would such a STT tax in the USA reduce a lot of possibly harmful churn from algorithmic trading? Or would it be extremely harmful to everyone by reducing liquidity? Wondering how that is working out in the Philippines?

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

He used to win these market timing games because no one was paying attention to huge short positions. You could quietly bet against a company, or, better yet, you could quietly amass a short position and then release stunning negative news that you had uncovered and watch the stock price tank.

These days it is more likely that online investors will notice a large short, and drive the price of the stock up until the person holding the short gets margin called and loses all of their money. The shorters then provide the liquidity you need to get out of the position. There used to be good money in shorting terrible companies, but in an age where hordes of armchair investors can drive the price of GameStop to the moon that strategy is just too risky.