This is probably the best way to deal with someone in these situations. No insults, no arguments, just “I thought you were smarter than that”. It might actually make them think about it rather than dismiss you out of hand.

I feel you on the radio aspect, I cycle through all my presets on my 25 minute commute because so many of them are just ads for 5 minutes. And for some reason my rural area has 4 classic rock stations but I can’t find one that plays anything modern but pop and pop-country.

I took it to mean “it has increased to the point we can’t deal with it all”

These sorts of things always make me wonder how much of this is hubris and how much is stupidity. Do they really not see how bad it is to just replace your search results without telling you and charge advertisers for you not searching their brand or did they know and just didn’t think that anyone could catch them?

We constantly hear about executives being completely out of touch with the real world, but we also see them just not understanding the basics of business. It really could be either but it’s probably a fair bit of both.

I don’t think I agree with this, I know I became more aware and more empathetic after I was able to improve my financial situation. I believe that a lot more people do care or would care than you think, it’s just that their energy and focus is on survival and trying to live in a world where you’re told spending=happiness.

Maybe it’s naive but I have a fair bit of faith in people doing the right thing when given a chance and a way to.

Completely agree higher salaries and less bureaucratic breathing over the shoulder attracts better teachers out of the public system and into private schools where only the privileged have access. But frankly who can blame them; here in Ontario the teachers spend more time without a contract than with one and our government tried making it illegal for education workers to strike last year. Wouldn’t surprise me if they tried the same thing when there’s a strike next month.

Thanks for the tip! I had heard of Montessori schools before but only in the context of fancy private schools. In the ~5 minutes of top level reading there are some really interesting ideas there, it’s definitely something I’ll be looking further into. A couple of friends have been lamenting the state of public schools here (Ontario, Canada) so alternate learning styles have been top of mind for me.

An interesting read, I think most of us agree that modern schooling isn’t really working for a lot of kids. If interest and real world focused education is going to work though it would need to be a community project rather than individual works. So much of early education is the social skill building and basics about the world that at least at first I think it would need to be fairly structured/standardized (sharing, courtesy, basic reading/math, etc.) Does anyone know if this sort of is being or has been tried on any large scale?