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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure what specifically is meant by phonics. My grandma taught first grade for 30 years, ending around 2000. She said when phonics came in “that’s just teaching reading” and when phonics went out “well, obviously we still have to teach how the alphabet works” and when phonics came in again “eye roll”. So, whatever the school leadership says, my guess is kids are learning phonics.


  • Remember that the stories you hear are always going to be the ones that are most controversial, otherwise they would not be news. The day in day out work of the FDA is enormous and most of it, I believe, necessary for the level of trust in what you find on the shelf, what you’re doctor recommends, what your pharmacist hands you, that we enjoy.

    I don’t want to have to know my farmer, my chemical compounder, my importer, my distributor, my restaurant chef, etc, etc, for every stupid thing just to avoid eating lead or feeding hepatitis to my kids.

    The loudest complaints-- selling raw milk is technically illegal? they allow red food coloring as long as you list it in the ingredients? they may or may not allow you to call oat liquid a “milk”?-- sound pretty small to me, and also even these issues are reviewed and discussed more or less transparently in response to people’s concerns.











  • Except I think it’s interesting this was not generalizable. The Spanish were looking for people, just different people at first. Cortez for example landed and immediately “employed” hundreds of native people to come up with some wealth to pay off the exploration debt. The friars were specifically there to convert people to Catholicism.

    The British puritans were looking to build their personal Utopia, but the Spanish and others, it seems to me, were looking for a populated colony from the start.







  • To me it’s not end of the story that’s the point of this, but the idea that when you are more social and engaged with different ideas your mind is more creative and energized and flexible. And there are other times, especially as you age, where you are more isolated and your mind slows and gets trained into rote thoughts. They may or may not be the same ones you started with, and they may be well earned and refined thoughts from a lifetime of experience, but stripped of the complex context they arose in, they are still just a simplistic starting point for the next round.