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thelock85 commented on Inmates at a Mississippi jail were ordered to do the guards' bidding   nytimes.com/2025/11/14/us... · Posted by u/thelastgallon
gpm · a month ago
I'd expect that removing everyone with resources to fight back against horrific abuse would make the abuse far more horrific, not less.
thelock85 · a month ago
I thought about that too, but I don’t think your resources matter much once you’re in the penal system except to bribe or pay for protection.

Honestly I’m not sure how it would pan out but it does appear that the power to abuse is directly correlated with the number of inmates and revenue generated as a result thereof.

thelock85 commented on Inmates at a Mississippi jail were ordered to do the guards' bidding   nytimes.com/2025/11/14/us... · Posted by u/thelastgallon
Ekaros · a month ago
Why should prisoner who can afford it get better conditions? To me there should be equality. Treat everyone the same in punishments.
thelock85 · a month ago
I agree with you on the ideal of equality.

Practically speaking, even the option to be home bound if you have a home, apartment, or willing caretaker could be a serious blow to the prison industrial complex, and the incentive structures that allow these guards to commit horrific abuse.

thelock85 commented on McDonald's is losing its low-income customers   latimes.com/business/stor... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
silisili · a month ago
At least from my perspective, COVID broke everything. People are more awful, quality is more awful, and prices are way up. I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.

There's an argument to be made that inflation is ultimately the driver of all three complaints, but boy did that all happen seemingly overnight.

thelock85 · a month ago
I have a slightly different take that everything was really broken right before, but Covid and its response brought everything to bear.

I see this play out a lot in ed reform politics where leaders conveniently compact decades of prior failure into the “Covid gap”.

To be sure Covid and the response produced a slew of new problems, too, but I think they are massively inflated by prior failures.

thelock85 commented on NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again   gothamist.com/news/ny-sma... · Posted by u/hrldcpr
pessimizer · a month ago
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)

After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.

edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.

thelock85 · a month ago
This.

Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.

Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.

thelock85 commented on China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world   economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/miohtama
Our_Benefactors · 3 months ago
> If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics?

A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.

> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?

If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.

thelock85 · 3 months ago
My great-grandmother’s home, those of her neighbors, and their church was bulldozed for the US75/I45 rebuild/connection in Dallas in the 1950s. They were given the choice of new public housing built nearby in an industrial area (around Fair Park where State Fair of Texas is held) or figuring it out on their own. Being Black and low-income meant whatever rights they “had” were hard to come by.

I guess my point is rights and freedoms are unequally held, regardless of a nation’s stated values and laws. What makes/made the US great is not that things happening in China couldn’t happen here. It’s that we (used to?) aspire to greater ideals about individual freedom even if it isn’t present for all. CCP and I think Chinese citizens are under no such illusion, and in some cases reject the individual for the collective. (I’m hedging a bit since my understanding is limited second-hand anecdotes from Chinese American friends).

thelock85 commented on Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI   research.google/blog/lear... · Posted by u/FromTheArchives
thelock85 · 3 months ago
I have been doing a lot of solo tinkering around this very idea —contextualizing learning for every middle school through college student according to their career and personal interests. Props for this team for actual piloting with real students. What I’ve found however is that students’ interests (in terms of novel engagement) move at the speed of culture. It’s the quirky TikTok personality, the local slang, aura farming memes and other stuff I hardly understand at my age. So really it boils down to how you decrease the lag time between creation of students’ cultural phenomena and updating/tuning models to account for this new (or localized) information. It also requires a UI/UX that accurately flags what part of this information students actually engage with —an even harder tasks since kids can’t write or communicate this type of information in language LLMs draw patterns from (if they can write descriptively at all). Great teachers who are in constant socioemotional and cultural exchange with their students figure this out at the classroom level… not sure it’s a solution that technology can replicate at scale but it’s still fun to tinker.
thelock85 commented on Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants   forbes.com/sites/michaelt... · Posted by u/hhs
thelock85 · 4 months ago
If you reduce the choice to public funding vs wealthy alumni stewardship, and there seems to be no meaningful pathway to circumventing the current assault on public funding, then why should you alienate your wealthy alumni?

Obviously the situation is much more complex and nuanced, but this framing (amongst others I’m sure) seems appropriate if you are thinking on a 25,50,100 year time scale in terms of impact of your decision. The country is littered with public and private universities who made poor moral choices across the 19th and 20th centuries but I’m not aware of any institutions suffering long-term reputational harm (or threat of insolvency) as a result of those choices. (Then again, maybe it’s because the harm was swift and final at the time)

thelock85 commented on A 17-year-old teen refutes a mathematical conjecture proposed 40 years ago   english.elpais.com/scienc... · Posted by u/leephillips
Qem · 5 months ago
I wonder how many years on average people can dedicate themselves to think deep about research problems, before they must stop thinking and start managing, or quit the race.
thelock85 · 5 months ago
You could replace “research” with nearly any term not undergirded by a direct profit motive (eg civics, politics, education, community health, urban planning). Or maybe it’s just (and you may be saying this) that one can only dedicate themselves up until a clear profit opportunity appears.
thelock85 commented on O3 Turns Pro   thezvi.substack.com/p/o3-... · Posted by u/jsnider3
leptons · 6 months ago
This is all stuff I would expect an LLM to "hallucinate" about. Every bit of it.
thelock85 · 6 months ago
I recently tried a version of this landscape analysis within a space I understand very well (CA college access nonprofits) and was shocked at how few organizations were named, let alone described in detail. Even worse, the scope and reach of the named orgs were pretty off the mark. My best guess is that they were the SEO winners of the past.

u/thelock85

KarmaCake day587September 1, 2011View Original