Not saying they aren't testing the waters, but raising the prices immediately gives them some time to buffer profit until they have to raise them the full amount to cover the tariff costs. It lets them ease into bad a bit slower so people don't scream as much - frog in warming water and all that.
I'll bite. I have several children. They all attended the same public school system in the same town for their entire K-12 education. Of those, three chose to apply themselves and graduated with an IB diploma.Two chose to not work as hard. One was just more of a people person, and still is. Another did great on tests, and could discuss any topic the teacher asked about related to the reading, but didn't feel homework was worth it. He'll give you a rational and fact based opinion on most any current subject you want to talk about.
I realize that we have good schools where I live. It's one of the reasons that I chose to live here, although the economic opportunities aren't grand. I'm quite sure that there are places where the public school is indeed failing. My college roommate had gone to Loyola in Chicago because of its problematic public schools.
I don't think that the system should be left alone, but I don't particularly fault the school system or the Department of Education for the results we have. We do need a federal level body to set up standards of what must be learned in each grade level. Our mobile population requires this. It is no benefit to our students when California teaches Geometry in 7th grade and North Carolina teaches it in 9th grade - just to give a completely random example with made up subject to grade matching to make my point. When families move, their kids shouldn't have missed out on subject X or a portion of subject X, nor should they have to take it twice. Federal standards aren't a bad thing. It's also a problem when students on advanced study tracks take math at an accelerated rate, but the standardized tests are oriented towards the normal track, so they are answering questions about something they may have learned two or three years ago rather than the last year. The concepts they are recently familiar with aren't touched because most students haven't learned them or perhaps won't even touch them in their entire K-12 education.
At the same time, I think the standards need to be raised higher. I really don't care if you are planning to end up in a vocational job - you need to be well educated. Pushing everyone higher needs to be emphasized. The expectations of everyone have dropped over the couple of centuries of our countries existence. And if you doubt that, I challenge you to take a college entrance exam from 150 years ago. Yes, knowledge has changed. But if you look at what was considered college level work 150 years ago and compare it to the general population then, our college entrance standards are pretty low today.
Teach your kids to read and to do basic math before they hit kindergarten. We did. Show them the value of reading and learning by doing it yourself. Don't just let your mind rot watching Fox or CNN or what passes for television these days. Pick up a book and read. My son that didn't feel homework was worth it just finished the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. He decided to read some Dostoevsky and also has my copy of War and Peace that is on his reading list. Those books weren't ones I was assigned in school. They were just ones I chose to read (although GA 1 was so bleak I never made it to GA 2 or 3). Get your kid's heads out of the tablets that they seem so attached to from the time they can physically hold them up. Put down the cell phones. Turn off the gaming consoles. Convince them that they don't need to let their minds rot on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or whatever the latest fad is. And if you don't think any of that is important, then don't make the Department of Education your scapegoat when nothing seems to be going well.
With the ability to run cloud based servers anywhere, exactly how are you going to determine if a packet is ultimately destined for China? Any information really important can be downloaded "locally" and go in a diplomatic pouch.
The weight of an e-reader like Kindle is much easier on these old joints than a heavy hardback or holding a paperback's pages open. A kindle holder makes it even less work. A book a day keeps the mind active.
But the younger generation not reading much at all other than tag lines and short pithy comments certainly doesn't help any. Their attention span doesn't even reach to full length videos very often.
Fiber performance is higher and you don't have to deal with overlapping frequency issues though.
Rural fiber is expensive. But many rural spots are also high wind which means wireless has antenna directional issues. The towers are also difficult to get to and also have power and wind issues. Line of sight is also an issue.
I'd prefer a centrist party that lopped off the loons on both sides. FWIW, Christianity should remember Christ's command to "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's". Everyone, including religious people, have a right to express opinions in the political arena and to vote their conscience. But religion's goals should be different. Get more hearts truly in tune with what God wants and not what a particular religious group thinks He wants, and there would be better candidates on all sides winning the nominations. Remember all of God's commands and not just the easy ones. Reestablishing the fear of God (versus the fear of a religious group) would also be useful in mitigating some of the excesses and errors from the elite.
When you have an incoming president who has promised to prosecute everyone he thinks has wronged him, what do you expect? He shouldn't complain about any pardon Biden has made when he's planning to pardon all the insurrectionists from Jan 6 who were indicted by grand juries of citizens and convicted by juries of their peers.
First, I'm Republican - not a Trump lover - but Republican. There were a lot of very angry people over COVID-19 handling in 2020, and I'd suspect that, by itself, led to higher voter counts in 2020 vs the other years. Hatred of inflation that is on the wane is far less of a motivator to vote than hatred of masks and isolation were in 2020.
And whether you like it or not, predominately blue districts were negatively impacted in 2024 due to bomb threats and long wait times. Shutting down mail voting as many places as possible was also an issue. Like it or not, some workers have a harder time making it to the polling places and long wait times after work don't help.
We need to figure out how to get all legal voters to be informed in an unbiased way and actually vote. Yeah, that's fantasy. But it should still be the ideal we shoot for. Gerrymandering by any party needs to stop. Every voter should have the same approximate wait times to vote and each voting precinct should have the same relative average distance to voting place per voter. While we're at it, give Puerto Rico statehood. How they're treated during hurricane season is a national disgrace. If that annoys people, look at a East and West California, Oregon, and Washington. That would make a lot of people happy there. To keep the electoral college sane, go to proportional ECs based on popular vote for all states out to say 4 decimal places.
If any party can't win fairly, they really don't deserve to be in power.
It's doomed to fail because the vast majority of people choose taste and texture over healthy until they end up in the ER or doctor's office and they are forced to choose between healthy and dead. And even then, it's a hard choice for some.
And their data connections can be severed by anchors and their sides caved in by depth charges.
No. Even people who are illiterate in general can recognize some sequences of letters and fill in the circle or press the lever or whatever that is next to that. (D) or DEMOCRAT - yup, that's for me or (R) or REPUBLICAN - yup, that's for me, regardless of the quality of the candidates or if they can even read the name of the candidates. Trying to understand why one might be better or worse is a lost cause for them. Someone on Fox or CNN or Facebook said this individual was better, so that's my choice.
Yes, that's a sad state of affairs. But it is the reality we live in. The talking heads and news sources people tune in to all their waking hours have more influence than anything written.
On the contrary, newspaper corporations themselves have rendered the local newspaper mostly content free. They've abandoned local reporters and local printing which guarantees it arrives just as slowly as national newspapers. They repeat entire pages of local events as filler day after day, only changing when the date of the event passes and call that news. And they load up wire stories for news. Even local sports is minimal although that was never an interest of mine. I gave up the local paper last year after decades of subscribing as I reached my limit of pain - their subscription fee rose above the WSJ, to which I do subscribe.
I love to read as well. Although, I've intentionally cut back from the book a day I did in 2023 (253 so far this year that I bothered to rate).
But driving to the library and walking around stacks of books? Bah. My Kindle has its own 6,000+ library of books that I've downloaded when they were free on Amazon. I'm gradually plowing through them. And occasionally I find my tastes have changed and I expunge some that are still waiting to be read. That's all my Amazon Prime subscription is good for in my opinion - a free book a month - but that pays for a good chunk of the subscription and there is usually a good selection to pick from each month. The Kindle Unlimited subscription isn't much different than the gas and time cost of going to a physical library and opens up more books you can "check out" of Kindle for as long as you need - currently up to 20 or so at a time. Return them when you've gotten them read as opposed to a library deadline. And my Kindle is a lot lighter to pack around than a single book, let alone 6,000.
I did buy and read a great many physical books in my lifetime, but as I've aged, holding up the latest several hundred page hardback Tom Clancy (by whoever is currently writing his yarns) book was hard on my wrists and fingers. So I switched to a Kindle and haven't looked back.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
