I see that very clearly, it’s a slow process that continues to eat away at teaching. It’s a similar thing we’re seeing in nursing with actual gig apps for nursing existing already trying to sell it as a way to control your schedule. COVID did a number on traditional nursing jobs with a lot more going through travel or agency gigs, shit we’re seeing with charter schools, something my mother hates but can’t fully articulate the reason as to why it’s bad beyond seeing them siphoning off a bunch of funding that would’ve otherwise gone to the district.

When I was in my first year as a nurse we were expected to complete a research project as part of our year long “nurse-residency” program. They gave us maybe 2-3 hours at most per month to complete it. They more or less made it impossible to do without working on your own time, something I didn’t do, but my coworkers did. You could come in on your day off and have them pay you for the time you spent in the library, but most of my coworkers had a 30+ minute drive. In the end the person in charge of the program denied our research project stating that the highest levels of the CDC stated that their existing policies were good and correct and that our idea was wrong and impossible to test. In the 4 years since, I’ve only seen more academic papers come out and prove us correct, that IVs can be changed as needed rather than scheduled every 3 days. We didn’t have to do the full project since our proposal was denied which actually let us all kinda coast through the rest of it and just state we were denied testing, but I can’t imagine how much more time it would’ve demanded from us to come in on our days off to do extra work because of this. Most of the other groups went with dumb bullshit like placing more recycling cans around to encourage recycling. I wanted to do staffing ratios but my group was afraid of it being too antagonistic to administration.

While sorta off topic it’s still sorta related. My mother’s school district has transitioned away from traditional grading methods which is in line more with the research that states letter grades are not nuanced enough and end up discouraging students. I don’t believe anything outside of quizzes actually holds any solid weight towards pass/fail now, but there are other factors that go into the pass/fail determination. They’ve changed the curriculum for a third time in three years requiring teachers to make all new plans and basically have to play learn the curriculum a week ahead of the students.

The end result is my mother working basically every day 730a-5p along with work she brings home and continues to work on up until like 7-8pm with a little time for commute and dinner. She’s doing close to 12 hour days and grading has become significantly more difficult because these better methods also require more actual labor from a teacher to work properly, but in a country where people don’t want to become educators because of the terrible conditions, the conditions continue to get worse.

Between standardized testing and standardized online classwork, there’s less of an actual education role they’re filling while having to monitor all the students. They also have ended up with more behavioral problems in the past few years likely as a combination of COVID fucking shit up and mainstreaming students that would otherwise be in a specialized classroom for the serious behavioral issues since the theory is that placing students that are lagging behind in with the rest will help pull them forward but the general gist has seen them being more of a disturbance and pulling other students down with them.

Homework is mostly a waste of time and my mother has long since stopped assigning it instead opting that if “you don’t finish it in class, finish it at home” with exceptions carved out for students that are just generally slower at the work for whatever reason.

I feel like we just need an top to bottom redo of the American education system. Students aren’t benefiting from half these attempts at reform in a positive direction because the teachers are overworked to hell, teachers are less open to change because they’re already being asked to do too much with less and less. Students are basically just sat in front of a computer most of the day anymore to do everything. Just like what I see in my line of work in healthcare, the entire thing is standing on the most termite damaged, rotted beams imaginable and it’s only through the sheer grace of God that it hasn’t all fallen down yet.

Can Americans keep their drones out of other sovereign nations’ airspace? Seems pretty easy to just stop flying them unlike a weather balloon getting blown off course.

A lot of these Hansen wannabes are also kinda sus themselves if we look at that EDP sting where the dudes were like “if she was 16 I’d have some trouble myself”.

The hospitals in my area are all “non-profit.” The SNF I worked at was “non-profit.” They bragged that they were bringing in over a billion in revenue as a moderately sized regional health network when they were trying to recruit us in nursing school It doesn’t mean anything other than they have to spend all their money by the end of the year, which is typically done by padding administrative and executive salaries obscenely while paying nurses and CNAs a pittance.

I feel like every so often I need someone from outside Hexbear to say the very obvious thing because I feel like I’m just being gas lit by the entire world around me. Basically nobody masks anymore. Other healthcare workers all dropped the mask once they were given the green. You’d think you’d have more people that actually understand this stuff in healthcare but in reality everyone wants to just move on when it does basically nothing and condemns us to continue this nightmare.

Nina Simmons as relevant today as she was 60 years ago, goddamn.

Honestly I’ve been playing it but also asking myself why I’ve been playing it. I’ve had an overall smooth experience for the most part, some Bethesda jank, some glitches like doors not opening but that’s solved with tcl. The more I play though the more I’m finding it to be unbelievably grindy. Levels trickle in once you’re in the 30s. People on Reddit were so loud to say you don’t need that many resources so the complaints about carry weight and the obnoxious weight of resources was actually a good thing but in reality you need a shitload of them. If you want to do weapon modding, good luck because it’s so heavily gated behind not only skills and resources, but research that like 100 hours in and I’m nowhere near close to unlocking all of it.

My goal for the game was to fly a cool ship, to shoot cool guns, and to have a cool outpost. I finally hit class C ships and built one, but it’s kinda dopey looking. I don’t have the resources to do all the weapon modding research and I’ve been a loot goblin the entire game picking up everything I can in terms of resources. Even installed a mod that removed the weight of resources.

The game also takes a bunch of steps back from Fallout’s weapon modding. In Fallout you could just buy a mod and slap it on the right gun, in Starfield, there are no mod items. If I find a better rifle that’s the same exact thing but scaled up, I can’t transfer my mods over to it, I have to rebuild all the mods again with all the rare and annoying resources once again. Same with ship building, can’t transfer parts between ships.

At this point I’ve mostly given up on outpost building since that’s another level dump to even get to a reasonable point. I know you can harvest resources through outposts and I have been, it’s just so obnoxiously boring to teleport between each one to do stuff and the resource demand is also so damn high to build anything.

Haven’t touched the main quest since I was first able to just run away and do my own thing. Most stuff in the game is a fetch quest, a go talk to this person quest, or a murder everyone quest. A quest that had an interesting premise, First Contact, was so bad, I ended up putting the game down.

Honestly, I’m mostly ready to just hit up Rimworld and maybe pick up Stellaris in a few days with the new patch coming out tomorrow. Once again Bethesda has made a wide but incredibly shallow experience and left it to the community to make it better. Thank god I didn’t pay for it.

One of the things I found in game to be obnoxious is when you go to one settlement on mars to go into the actual part with people in it you need to cycle the airlock, so you’re stuck waiting for the airlock to cycle before it opens and loads in the interior. There is no actual airlock. And then through fast traveling, you’re placed right in front of that airlock meaning you’re forced to wait at the airlock a bunch of times.

I like that there’s one that’s just like “fuck you Rhode Island.” Can’t imagine how a strong hurricane would fuck shit up in that region.

God that would be such an amazing timeline for Biden to eat it. Trust the science to get COVID and die motherfucker.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if the NPC has a name they’re just invincible and even sometimes random unnamed guards are invincible. Coming right off the heels of BG3 where I generally had the freedom to pick my solution, it’s very frustrating. If I wanted to take a fight that was extremely disadvantageous to myself, I could, I’d more than likely die, but I could take the fight. My first reminder of it being a Bethesda game was when while lost in New Atlantis desperately trying to find a vendor because I’m overencumbered 90% of the time and it’s not even 2 hours in, I pick up and throw a box. Suddenly the entire city’s population, guards and civilians, have their guns trained on me and they’re all trying to kill me. In BG3, if I moved someone’s box they’d look at me grumpily and then pick the box up so I couldn’t touch it again.

“If you’re innocent then just comply” they say acting as if the cops aren’t just looking for a reason.

Like what were those cops even doing, it looked like they were trying to break into empty cars and all of a sudden they saw a real person, converged and then just murdered her.

The one talking about how it’s everyone disrespecting them that led to this needs to just face the wall.

Strange how all that voting in 2020 did nothing but give Dems a majority that they pissed away. They had opportunity after opportunity to push shit through but somehow got thwarted at every turn. Oh no it’s the Parliamentarian coming in with a steel chair! Oh dear God it’s Sinema and Manchin coming from behind! They could’ve ended the filibuster but never did. Biden could’ve packed the courts but never did. Like at this point what can they do? They’re hobbled by their own masturbatory fantasies of West Wing politicking. In reality it’s a sham. The US was not built to be a democracy, the “Founding Fathers” intentionally tried to obfuscate the voting process to keep it away from the masses. This nation was built on enslavement and genocide and under no circumstances did voting ameliorate their plight. How many wars were waged by indigenous people fighting for their survival as the US continued to break treaties and encroach on their homelands? For some reason the name is not coming to me right now but there was this large civil war fought in the US over slavery that a lot of people like to insist were over states rights. For workers rights the working class paid for it dearly in unmarked graves and terrified screams as workers were locked inside of a burning building. Voting didn’t change any of this, we had to fight for every inch we’ve ever gotten.

No they’re not. You have conservative think tanks with a detailed plan about how they’re going to make being trans illegal in the US and you have literally nothing from the leader of the Democrats who is supposedly different in their priorities with queer folk. There hasn’t been any serious attempt at pushback against states criminalizing and going after trans youth. And in the context of years and years of conservative laws across the country eroding our right to exist, they release a statement like this. There is no difference between these people. They just want to be able to call themselves allies because they think it builds character for themselves. Allies cannot dictate our liberation and allies will just as quickly silence their support of us when it becomes a little uncomfortable while we are still here and we still have to live in this shitty country.

But tell me how it’s all according to keikaku and that the Dems are actually totally on our side guys, just ignore the last 70 years of history.

Look at all the harm being reduced. Look at how this was and will be the most important election of our lives

Clearly trans people are only good enough to get your rocks off to and then be discarded. But tell me again why I need to vote for and how they’re really any different from ?

Had a hairdresser get very nervous when asking her to lop off like 2 feet of hair. I had avoided going to one for years because I was nervous they’d try to masculinize my hair style or just go too far and make it too short.