Nicholas Troester

OTOH, “I had to work with my teacher to figure out what the app is doing wrong and how to solve the problem” is actually a pretty solid pedagogical technique, aside from the fact it cannot scale.

Anecdatum, but my oldest has had some of their school apps replaced by ones that use AI. They apparently do not always give the correct answers, or explain how to solve problems in their problem sets. I have never met someone who hates AI more.

Relatedly to last rt, the difference between a good hr organization and a bad one is how seamlessly and easily they do the basic, boring, routine stuff. If an off-schedule retention promotion or an fmla request can’t get done, a bigger initiative will be a disaster.

I did a summer lesson with my kid on ww2. I don’t know how they thought it would go, but they did not expect so much of it to be “Germany needs ore, so it goes here; Germany needs oil, so it goes here; the U.S. can get anything anywhere in any time frame no matter how short, so they win”

I never fly-fished but I did enough of the rest of it that I can follow, but were really taxing my interest level here.

There sure is a lot of fishing in this story about fishing.

I cannot believe I missed this excellent idea by just six months.

Anyway, Spain and Germany both had their actual reckonings in the 90s and 00s, when conveniently most of the people responsible were already dead. If you wanted to look into the future.

Also these are mostly not works that I loved, or even really liked. Anniversaries, yes, and a few others, but honesty is harsh to read and dishonesty does have a way of emerging.

I think I thought I would get some insight into the German psyche, but as it turns out, the Exilliteratur writers had no direct experience; the writers who were there mostly didnt want to talk about it.

Cf Christa Wolf informed to the Stasi for several years and just kinda forgot? Many such cases.

In the real world news, I finished The Tin Drum today, thus completing my survey of major and minor writers from 20th century Germany and Austria.

(I did not like the book, but completism sometimes wins out in the end.)

My children have inherited my “not a joiner” tendencies; getting the older one to do an art class germane to their talents and interests involved a lot of discussion about how the logistics of it would work. Parenting is ridiculous from one end or the other.

It me, the one on the right.

“It surprised me how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross a street against general disapproval. How little my rational convictions seemed to weigh against the pressure of their scolding. Striding out boldly into the intersection with apparent conviction made a more striking impression, perhaps, but it required more courage than I could normally muster. “As a way of justifying my conduct to myself, I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this. "You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay in shape so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is 'anarchist calisthenics? Every day or so break some trivial…” (cont’d)

“…law that makes no sense, even it it's only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you'll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you'll be ready."”

Thinking of the late James C. Scott today.

I would like to march in protests too, but I can’t because I have arthritis in my knees. So I want my words to do my marching for me. Like everybody else, I am an inhabitant of this planet; and I am a member of many other smaller communities too. I am an American citizen, for example. I was made a citizen from birth retroactively by the US government after World War II when babies born to US servicemen and German women were declared citizens from birth. My German mother came with me to the US as an immigrant without English when I was four years old and had no English either. Now I am a philosopher and a Christian -- a Catholic, actually. I identify as a woman. And so on. I grieve the overwhelming evil that is impossible to ignore in every one of these communities. The sight of the suffering of desperate people trying to be immigrants to the US is unbearable. The inhumanity of separating their children from them, the viciousness of incarcerating small children alone, is unspeakable. And the cruelty we see on the daily news obscures but cannot hide the accelerating harm we are doing to the earth. The people who should take the lead in governing us are vile, and so many of those who vote relish the vileness. That group includes some prominent Christians. Christians are meant to be salt and light for the world; their lives are meant to help other people taste and see the goodness of God. These people make the God they worship seem so hateful. And so, like many other people, I mourn. But my mourning is without despondency, without the inward collapse of despair. The baseness of injustice highlights the majesty of justice, whose power to call to people cannot be defeated by evil. The cruelty of those who rule, their indifference to the cry of the poor, illuminates by contrast the splendor of goodness and love. The growing dread at the increasing destruction of the planet testifies to its beauty. There would be less distress over [...]

From the prominent Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump.

www.facebook.com/eleonore.stu...

Like, they’re fine people but I barely trust them to put together an e-commerce experience; I’m not trusting them at all beyond that.

I was an HR business partner for a few years for some smart software engineers. Pretty much uniformly good people, too. I cannot really overemphasize how little “can code good” implies about knowledge or intelligence in any field other than coding good.

I have read the first two volumes already but would reread!

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

this mlk quote is why some states didn’t officially recognize mlk day until like 2000

Against all my better instincts, I am attempting to do some political theory again. Writing, editing, revising. We will push this baby bird out of the nest no later than next week.

The Chippewa and the Tittabawassee, hence our city’s beloved Tridge.

The example that popped into my mind was taking my kids to the NC Zoo, which is several miles of walking and a lot of it uphill. The alternative was not letting them walk, it was not going in the first place!

Boy, people are prepared to fight about the wildest things.

Anti-…stroller? I am attempting to remember back a few years and it seems like going out into the world *at all* required a stroller for years, especially with two.

Listening exclusively to phish in 1999-2000 looks less, with time, like an unfortunate detour and more like a guy who wanders into a fallout shelter right before a nuclear blast. Not a place you’d want to be, ordinarily, but look at the alternative.

“Everyone likes best the music from when they were 15-22”, but sometimes those years include 1999, and 2001, and 2000, and 1998, and even 1997, the year that britpop died. There was swing and ska! There was nu-metal! There was punk pop! It was a real bad time to be young.

I saw that list of hit songs from 30 years ago. I bring to you a difficult truth to accept, but truth it is: almost all of those songs are bad.

I wish my dissertation topic was less relevant to the world since 2010.

… it might once again be timely for me, the guy who wrote a dissertation in defense of humanitarian intervention, to explain why I have turned mostly against it.

My kids are on a quarterly schedule, and so I now just block off the second week of each quarter as “I will be sick”.

It’s giving “why doesn’t Cordelia lie to me like her sisters, I’m gonna destroy a kingdom about it.”