deathmtn

Yesterday, I drove a mile and paid $20 to properly dispose of three broken iPhones, a big battery, some CFC bulbs, and two cans of old paint.

90% of people have got to be just chucking these things in the trash.

Never forget: Alan R. Sex

Fun grayscale Nethack sprite sheet! These are fun to look at, even if you don’t play NetHack. (I don’t.)

If I was protesting a pharmaceutical company (and many if not all do deserve protesting!), I’d have a sign that said “Pharmaceutical? More like harmaceutical!”

Wood is still $5/sq. foot at hardware stores.

At our conference a couple days ago, I asked the guy’s teacher if the standard in fourth grade is to get an adult if there’s a physical problem like someone trying to smear food on you. I know it was in third grade.

The answer was, yes, you should still get a teacher. In my fourth grade, though, that would be the teacher’s answer, but a culture had developed among the kids in which it was widely believed that telling a teacher was for babies, and most kids would have just retaliated. Should things escalate, the larger kid would have the advantage.

In the guy’s school, I think the student-teacher ratio and connectivity are high enough for that culture to not develop. One side effect of that, though, is that aggressors get this extra edge from kids just not having any idea what to do about norms breaking if a teacher isn’t right there. (I do wonder how many people just Prisoner’s Dilemmas it and explicitly raise their kids to be aggressors and ask for forgiveness, not permission.)

Not that making elementary school more like the real adult world is a good idea, but I do wonder what is more like the real world? There is usually no authority nearby to appeal to in most adult-to-adult physical transgression situations, but if you trust the police for the particular issue, reporting it is almost certainly a better idea than getting into it yourself because of the possibility of armed violence. If you have a combination of race/local police/situation that makes it dangerous to report it to the police, then it still might make it better to not try to settle it give it up, again because of the gun/knife possibility.

Though what’s different in school, at least elementary schools, though not Medford High School, is the lack of a possibility of armed violence from the kid trying to humiliate you. Should you practice for the future in which these things should not be settled directly, or should you work on operating in unregulated situations?

Everyone needs some of each. I honestly do not know if the guy gets enough of practice with the unregulated kind, which I think people used to get either in their poorly-staffed school or by hanging out with whoever was in the neighborhood. I don’t think kids here hang out in the neighborhood. It’s all play dates or nothing. (Not to say everything was great about that.)

The guy has started randori in judo, so I suppose he is at least getting exposure to physical unpredictability. I don’t know about the rest, just like I don’t know about so many things about getting a reasonably well-rounded adult with good survival characteristics out of all of this.

40-minute run, 13 pull-ups. I mapped out a route that went through the Fells but got off-track and ended up running by a ton of cars again. I tend to think of running as relaxing, but the cars really suck the enjoyment out of it.

On the way back, I passed by the school, and the guy’s class was at recess. He was wandering around aimlessly by himself. He was probably having a good time thinking about Pikmin or something, but I think this lack of awareness and engagement is why kids have started targeting him.

A resale web site that encourages stories about products.

Sellers on Xianyu also share the backstories behind their listed products — often so lengthy and confessional that they have given rise to a new genre: “Xianyu Literature.” In one instance, a Xianyu user selling a secondhand laptop launches into an entire melodramatic narrative of how he met his ex-girlfriend. “I was just released from jail when I first met her in 2016,” he wrote in the product listing. “She is now getting married [to someone else.] It’s time to get rid of this laptop we used to watch TV on.”

An entire web site of “Baby shoes, never worn.”