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One could argue that PE is both A. ) the ultimate form of capitalism and B. ) explicitly creates inelastic demand. A truly free market will always succumb to dominating forces that create the inelasticity (or at least that's what history has consistently proven).

Not to be pedantic, but this would make you not so "pro capitalism as it comes". The ability to develop and sell houses, but not hold them (in service of rent-seeking) runs contradictory to the very core tenant of capitalism, which is private property and free markets. Socialism and supply/demand-markets are not mutually exclusive; it sounds like you're more amenable to a socialist or mixed-market system than you give yourself credit for.

No one says disabled people cannot attend elite universities

The author spent the byline and first half of the article trying to explain that these universities wouldn't accept people with disabilities because they're just too elite and highly-selective. The recent surge of disabilities is actually perfectly explained, even in the article. The diagnostic criteria for disabilities has changed over time, becoming more "relaxed" as some would put it. If the diagnostic criteria expands to include more people, we are going to see higher rates of disability.

The CDC reports that 1 in 4 Americans are disabled. Sure 38% is higher than 25%, but the 38% number is the worst case scenario, two of the other universities cited only had 20% of students who were disabled, below the CDC number.

one side campaigns by advocating more social spending

Ironically, having more social spending on 4-year universities would actually alleviate this problem if we are following the author's logic. If students weren't the ones footing the bill for their education, there would be less incentive for them to take measures to try and circumvent a system that penalizes low-performance (doubly-so because you both get a bad grade and you still have to pay back the money).

I read the headline/article exactly the way it was supposed to be interpreted. I'm also not reading that far into it, the byline literally states, "If you get into an elite college, you probably don't have a learning disability", which again, is simply not true and is ableist. Disabled people are not incapable of performing certain tasks, but they are hindered, which is why it's called a disability and not an inability.

Why is it so hard to believe that disabled people can be accepted into "elite" universities? I think the article author, and many of the commenters here, are conflating "normalised behaviours" with "intelligence". As a society we have normalised pushing students into being able to complete assessments within an allotted time frame, even though the time it takes to finish an assessment isn't a perfect measure of one's intelligence (regardless of whether or not the answers were factually correct/incorrect). We have normalised allowing people who are "articulate" to take up space in society because we have collectively decided that articulate people are more intelligent, even though that isn't inherantly true.

I don't doubt that many of those students are faking having a disability to game the system in order to benefit themselves, but this article and the discussion around it are anything but intellectual.

if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives

The thing I find interesting is that when most people talk about standardised tests, they are talking about assessments that benchmark how much trivial knowledge about a given subject one has, and this has been the standard for most of the history of the American education system. I would argue that this is a flawed way to measure a student's literacy–in any subject for that matter.

I would actually frame "learn and forget" as "learn and adapt" because I would much rather a student forget a piece of trivial knowledge, but still have the ability to figure it out on their own with the right resources than a student who can tell you the colour Benjamin Franklin wore on his 15th birthday, but couldn't explain the effects of imperialism on societies.

For much of history, we have incentivised rote memorisation of trivial knowledge and accidentally de-valued critical thinking and problem solving skills. Do you remember the backlash that schools got from _parents_ when schools started implementing Common Core in an attempt to get students to think more abstractly? While I scoff at them, I genuinely don't blame parents for coming to the conclusion that we should just do math "the way we used to do it", but I can't help but point out that this is leading to the exact decline in general literacy that we have seen in public schools over the years. Now when you start comparing the educational attainment of students in public schools vs. private schools this becomes a who other conversation that cell phones can't even begin to explain.

Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material?

One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.

Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop. (source: https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-...)

It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.

Every time the author mentions a problem that young men face, he explains it away by saying that it stems from a society that's built against serving the needs of men, even though the outcomes affect women all the same. He mentions the college debt crisis and it's affects on men merely one breath after explaining that women outnumber men in higher education. The housing affordability crisis is also not exclusive to men. Workforce participation of men can also be explained by relaxed gender roles and more women entering the workforce while their male counterparts take on domestic work. Pretty much the only thing he rightfully identifies as a uniquely male issue is suicide. Nobody is averse to identifying the issues that men face, but be correct in what you're identifying as a uniquely male issue. This author has been making the rounds in popular culture lately and I can't help but feel like it's because he's offering an oversimplified solution to a problem that runs much deeper than how we treat men and young boys. Society consistently asks women and non-White people to take ownership of their own problems, why can't we ask the same of men?

Are we supposed to just accept that because something is status quo, it’s permissible? The consequence for “stealing” food should never be death, ever, in any scenario. It’s also interesting that people taking and distributing food are characterised as “gangs”, this suggests that taking a vital resource and redistributing it is somehow criminal.

Edited to correct syntactical error.

Sure there is, but we’re not talking about firing “warning shots” at armed combatants, we’re talking about unarmed civilians, most of whom are minors. If you are sympathetic to the idea that these aid sites need to be heavily guarded, then you need to ask yourself why this level of force is necessary, because the explanation the IDF and Israeli officials are giving makes no sense. Can you imagine if we fired “warning shots” towards the homeless for lining up too early for the food bank?

“Fire at unarmed crowds” and “fire towards crowds” is the same thing, what sort of semantic ping pong is this? Also propaganda =/= bad. All media is propaganda, in some languages the word “propaganda” has the same semantic meaning as the English word “advertisement”. This comment is war crime apologia.

In formal logic we would call this kind of argument a "post hoc justification". Any company who does anything payments-related is going to be primarily motivated to allow the most amount of transactions possible (including risky ones), everything else is a secondary consideration (including data security). I mean think about it, even if your company has a data breech, it's primarily brand reputation that's on the line, at that point your money has already been made. Of course, now that damage has been done there is a motivation to prevent it from happening in the future, but for companies like Coinbase who operate in emerging markets with little regulatory oversight, it's extremely hard to argue that they have are motivated to do anything besides grow and make money. After all, the mantra has always been "move fast and break things".

There are very good reasons for KYC, the problem here is not the government regulation, it's once again private companies being sloppy with their customer's data because sloppy is cheap and it's not their info on the line, it's yours, so there's little motivation for them to safeguard it _unless_ they're compelled to do it by law.

I never understood the anti-capitalist argument to be that it’s a top down system (and thus is why it’s “bad”), I think the critique is more that capitalism will inevitably beget hierarchies and self-reinforces them. And to be fair, some earlier attempts at socialism also begot hierarchies, but now I’m being a little pedantic.

you can expect that one or both sides will be using drones, at least for surveillance if not for offense

How is this any different than the risk that is currently present? Surveillance technology, in this day and age is ubiquitous and cheap. Attaching it to a drone is convenient for the offense, sure, but the technology described in this article is only a marginal improvement to what a stock drone can provide.

cameras that use object recognition to identify humans and road vehicles at long range

Is nothing more than a software improvement to a stock drone with a camera, but nobody complains about the massive proliferation of consumer drone devices.

This article, to me, reads like Red Scare propoganda. Regardless of where people are buying this technology, there are much more lethal "weapons of war" currently available to people with very little legal oversight (i.e. you can buy a semi-automatic rifle in most US states without a permit or background check).

You created your account today on a tech discussion board where you aired a personal grievance you have against a company that has a proven track record of operating above the board and accused them of "stealing" your money. Then you complained that your post got outvoted and was no longer on the front page. You are not the only person in the world that this has happened to and you should not expect the entire internet to bend to your desires to comfort you. Again, relax, breathe, wait for Stripe to reply. You will get your money.

So the “weapons of war” in question are… cameras? But because those cameras are also used by the Russian military that means that China Bad? Meanwhile gun laws in the US would like to have a chat…

It sounds like you're just frustrated at being in an (understandably frustrating) situation. Your post wasn't removed, it probably was just outvoted. Breathe.

Their quickest publicly listed SLA is 6 hours. I realise $50k is a lot of money, but give it some time. Though frustrating, and wrong on their part, no money was stolen. You'll get it eventually.

You most likely got caught in some sort of automated detection. Have you tried reaching out to their customer service?

This is an impossible question to answer, nobody can predict the future. It’s not always a given that we would simply regress to what came before it, that’s the point. You don’t have the ability to predict the future either.

Yes they would require those things, but there would no longer be an incentive to use energy sources that have the marginal benefit of making a few people very rich with the incredible downside of killing our planet.

Abolishing capitalism wouldn't change the physics and engineering of natural gas wells, nor of the lumber mills and mining required to make paper and wood.

Of course it wouldn’t, I don’t think anybody would believe this. Abolishing capitalism would change the incentive for collecting and utilising those natural resources, though. It’s a lot easier to justify the made up idea of private property when you’re sitting on a pile of rocks that you believe will make you a lot of money than it is to justify sitting on a pile of rocks that a few people decided might be processed into something that’s a net positive to all of society. I have to wonder if plastics would be as ubiquitous as they are today if we didn’t have a very strong social and economic incentive to drill for its raw materials.

Nobody here brought up serfdom except you and your snarky comment doesn’t provide anything of value or broaden the analysis here. The absence of capitalism doesn’t beget serfdom, it doesn’t even beget socialism or communism, it begets the absence of capitalism. Think bigger, friend.

Except the decades of materials science research demonstrates that even independently of those economic incentives, scientists understand that although plastics are incredibly valuable in a variety of applications, they’re not perfect (and at worst, actively harmful). This research is being done not because scientists would be sad to think of a world without plastics that provide land owning oil barons their precious return on investment, they’re researching it because science and human progress are what drive us forward. Thus, even in our hypothetical, it’s unclear that plastics (and their ubiquity even in applications where it doesn’t make sense) would win out.

Not sure why this was downvoted, it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Even ideas as abstract as private property comes into play here, private owners are incentivised to make the most of their investments, and when one of the many main vehicles for wealth is land ownership, one is driven to find ways to maximise the use of that investment which in this case would be drilling oil which in turn gets further refined into plastics (among gasoline, etc.).

If we weren’t forced to live under a system that prioritises private ownership and the maximisation of profits, can we honestly say that we would independently come to the conclusion that our continued use of fossil fuels and their derivatives is okay and should continue?

don't make a black-and-white there-is-no-alternative declaration that other people have no choice in the matter

say the person who quite literally can't accept that there can be more than three letters in an acronym, less the entire world order be thrown to the wind

Trans is an umbrella term that can be used to refer to anybody who does not identify with or express the gender they were assigned at birth (https://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-orientation-and-gender-...). Having surgery and/or always presenting as a gender you weren't assigned at birth is not a prerequisite to being trans. "Transvestite" is a somewhat dated term that is considered offensive in some circles, though either way, a transvestite would by definition be "trans".

How does this comment help anybody or move the conversation forward?