When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
Behavior like this is why I unironically have lost the mythos of "teachers are good for society" as default thinking. I get why Mao/Pol Pot/Communists through history lined them up against walls.
Most, even in America, are little tyrants who has entirely far too much power to pick and choose the winners and losers of society. A single bad teacher acts like a whole bucket of crabs pulling down on soon-to-be-succesful youth.
It was always funny to us as kids, and we often laughed at the poor bugger who had earned that punishment (and were laughed at when it was us).
Our teachers didn't abuse us like some do in other societies, with extra homework and detention. We new the rules and punishment for breaking them, and made choices accordingly. Wonderful teachers who I remember fondly decades later, though some of them have passed on.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
That's a fair point. The challenge is that a lot of the time, it's hard to escape in that way. The ideal would be that a bully is expelled or forced to change schools to get their victims away from them, but the system seems very reluctant to do that. Same with letting the victims find a new school to replace the old one.
It works really well for bullying in workplaces and communities though.
And true, the bully might win. But the thing is that it puts the victim from an easy target to a slightly harder target, and a bully may decide it's not worth the hassle/risk when others aren't going to fight back at all. It's like that old joke about outrunning a bear; you're not trying to outrun the bear, you're trying to outrun the people next to you. Or perhaps the old adage about home burglaries. A lock won't stop a determined thief, but they'd usually rather find an easy to break into house than go through the effort of defeating a security system.
In any case, it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people.
Yeah. Instead of teaching school bullies to respect others, we are reinforcing the value of power dynamics, where the one in power defines the rules, and the weak must accept and suffer.
> it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people
Not curious at all. Ingrains the lesson that, should you feel inclined to abuse your strength, there is always someone stronger. That's a clear lesson that even works on psychopaths who otherwise feel no remorse and cannot be influenced by other means.
Conversely, it also ingrains the lesson that it is ok to abuse anyone weaker than you A) if you know you can get away with it (because someone stronger is not always around/aware/inclined to intervene), or B) because that is just normal / the way the world is.
I don't see how that follows. In an environment in which physical correction has no reason, and is doled out unfairly (as with alcoholic parents), then sure, someone would ingrain the idea that the world is callous and unfair and they should get theirs at the expense of others if they can. If they instead only experience physical correction due to specific reasons that are deemed far outside the bounds of acceptable (such as inflicting violence on others), that's a whole different lesson.
If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time.
It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour.
The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs.
The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers.
The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.
I would bet that you can find used calculus textbooks quite easily.
I did chemical engineering long ago (how long? Computerized process control was just being introduced into the curriculum, and we learned to program in Fortran). I did several calculus courses, but it was always just a matter of memorizing techniques.
Much later, I came across Calculus Made Easy on Project Gutenberg, a textbook from 1914 that actually helped me to understand why calculus works, instead of just treating it like magic.
Compute! was very much aimed more at the home market that Byte (which appealed more to IT professionals). At the time, though, Compute! and Compute's Gazette (for Commodore computers) were great for me.
The most amazing magazine of all, though, was The Transactor. Exclusively Commodore, and for programmers. Very few ads, too. Their "Inner Space Anthology" was an incredible resource for everything technical. Memory maps, ROM listings, and much, much more.
From 1988-91, I was a volunteer teacher in Africa. I lived in a hut without running water or electricity, and I had a subscription to Byte.
There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.
I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).
This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.
I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.
My people. My first paid programming was hand translating a BASIC app to C. I did it on the same paper the original was printed on (green/white continuous feed). When I thought I had it right I went to my mom’s work in the middle of the night to type it in and check it. Over the course of a summer I made it work.
I took what I learned from BYTE and wrote a CP/M terminate/stay-resident 'driver' that got some interesting hardware working well enough to get me the contract, as a teenager, to write the DOS driver for thing as well.
That led to a rocket-ride career through decades of systems programming, and I just can't thank the BYTE folks enough for those mind-expanding days ..
Me too. We'd write and discuss them at school, then run home and try them out. QBasic, and batch file viruses. Ages 10 and 11. Fast forward 35 years and kids play minecraft, programming is dying, and modular desktop computers themselves are seemingly becoming a rarity between surveillance mobile phones and surveillance TVs. Disposable vape pens have more processing power and screen resolution than our household PCs back then, which cost thousands of dollars.
I was in Lesotho, a small country completely surrounded by South Africa (when the White farmers were expanding and taking all the Africans' farmland, they left Lesotho because it was all mountains, but with no minerals).
If you click on a city's name, you can see a list of all flights arriving and departing. Some of the arriving ones will be in flight, and you can click on the flight number to view it, then "Cockpit" view to see (roughly) what the pilots are seeing.
That sounds wonderful. Our experience with an Ioniq 6 has been less spectacular. First of all, in winter the range drops from 520km to about 350km, and charging takes about 50% longer.
Then when we took a long trip we only found one or two charging stations faster than 10kW every 300km. Many of the chargers were not functioning, some were on private property (e.g. car dealerships) and closed on Sundays, and none of them were rated at more than 100kW (and typically charging at about 70kW). The ones that were 100kW often had one or more cars waiting for them, so our 90-minute charge could have taken double that.
The only exception was a Tesla supercharger station, but my wife refuses to support Elon Musk in any way, so that was out.
This is in Southern Ontario, outside the Greater Toronto Area.
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
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