Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

I don't fall for clickbait. But it's impossible to ignore the headlines, and sometimes it's fun to read how silly they get, like the UN chief claiming the Earth is boiling.

I apologize for assuming you meant personal criticisms. There's too much of it everywhere, not just slashdot, and I shouldn't assume everyone is doing it.

When slashdot started requiring logins to avoid most of the spambots, it annoyed me, and when I did finally sign up, my handle was my protest. It was amazing back then how many others accused me of hiding behind the anonymous handle.

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.

Trump is taking about sending $2000 checks to everybody from tariff revenue. Where does he get that authority?

The whole pile of cards is rotten. Quibbling about which President is worse is just more clickbait, whether you like the word or not.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

> The President can only direct funds at his discretion if the Congress has allocated those funds for him.

Well, in theory. Biden tried several times to soak taxpayers for student loans without Congressional approval, and that was up to a trillion dollars all told. Trump kept trying to divert funds for his wall.

If you think "falling" for Trump's trolling over this measly export tax is silly, take it up with the many pundits both pro and con who think it is worth their clickbait.

Most notably, Warren Buffett said he never saw Bitcoin as a proper investment vehicle.

I don't remember now, other than not being some hysterical TDS-ridden pundit. It may have been what was planned then, it may have been the kind of hints Trump likes flicking out, I don't remember. If you say it isn't now, I'll give that more credence, but everything Trump does changes daily.

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)"

I do not think it goes into his pocket. But last I read of it, it goes into a fund controlled by the President -- a slush fund, in olden terms.

Just as he does not personally own the US Steel golden shares which were the price for allowing the sale to the Japanese. But the President personally controls those shares, and he personally has veto over everything US Steel does.

One of the alleged differences between socialism and fascism is that a socialist government owns the means of production while a fascist government "merely" controls them. It's a distinction without a meaningful difference.

The big picture point is, he claimed banning the export of those chips to China was a matter of national security. Now it turns out that paying an unconstitutional 25% export tax into a fund controlled by the President makes the national security aspect vanish. There are names for this kind of corruption.

I'm in Europe now and there was a spate of arson attacks a couple of months ago, sometimes hitting the same target multiple times. Some of these attacks were unsolved AFAIK but in cases where they managed to get hold of the "perps", most (or all) of them were teenagers from the Netherlands who had been trained and then driven to near the targetted building with the materials they needed to carry out the attacks.

no problem.

Trump told us it was a matter of national security to ban selling these precious chips to China. Now he tells us 25% for the big guy can make that problem go away.

Sounds pretty cheap to me. So much for the Art of the Deal.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.