Whole foods are affordable and healthy. My wife and I eat mostly rice, tofu, lentils (especially red), and vegetables (mostly frozen). We buy in bulk, spend around $350 a month on groceries (while barely eating out), and have a lot of variety through preparing the tofu and lentils in different ways. Our favorites recipes are from
Nisha Vora of Rainbow Plant Life and The Vegan Chinese Kitchen.
The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
> The schools also get more funding if the students perform poorly.
that's such a weird policy.
The teachers can produce poorly performing students easily (without much effort i might add), but cannot do that very same for well performing students (even with effort). The incentive to produce poor performing students to get more funding means it's misaligned with the student's best interests.
Schools and students _should_ be incentivized to perform well, and funding ought to be a portion of that incentive.
Yup. I've taken adult lessons in things, and I don't continue to buy lessons if the coach is unable to teach me. But in the public schools, watch what happens if you suggest merit pay. Shields up, Mr Sulu!
Instead, teacher pay is based on years of service and how many credentials you have.
(This is kind of a joke, because while the Hengshui school system is much more meritocratic, including in teacher salaries, it's also infamous for a stressful school environment. It's not really a joke though. While there are problems with the long hours, it's definitely better than whatever America has going on.)
Part of the issue with merit pay is if it's tied to simple metrics like grades, those metrics will get inflated without raising the things those metrics were meant to measure.
but grades that are external to the school could be used as the metric - something the school cannot tamper with themselves. Grades like "international baccalaureate assessments" or some sort of university entrance exams.
The set of ZIP codes to geographical school assignment is neither 1:1 nor onto. Actually,
(just kidding)
I agree that school assignment is highly variable. I'm glad your wife managed to get her appeal approved. It's unfortunate she even had to go through that process to begin with.
There should be a world standard or standards for genuine carbon credits. Maybe the UN could create an agency that determines such a standard and verifies that carbon credits meet that standard.
“Is spyware that causes torture and death in oppressive regimes worse than freemium apps?” is almost a comical take on the situation. I agree that many tech out there is useless or detrimental to society, but spyware must rank very close to the top. Adware a close competitor.
And transferring money from a bank or brokerage account takes time. Enough time that anyone paying attention should be able to report the transfer as fraudulent before it completes and have the account frozen.
I have been looking at the Boox Go 7... I have a Boox Note Air and generally like it a lot after the major software upgrade it got when Air 2 was released and also particularly running Android has been quite handy (for syncing journal articles with Zotero). But I am also very curious about Supernote Nomad and may go that way if I decide backlight doesn't matter. I do like backlight for reading in be without bothering my wife...
The Palma 2 doesn't have stylus support. I seriously considered the Supernote Nomad, the modular design is neat, but went with the Palma 2 for the backlight and the Boox software, which seems to be superior to Supernote for everything but writing and notes. If my primary use case were note-taking rather than reading, I would have gone with the Supernote Nomad.
What’s wrong with android? I enjoy that it makes boox devices more expandable. For instance I installed termux and used a bluetooth keyboard for a very interesting development environment (vim + c compiler)
Why would Boox disable sideloading on their own Android build? Your comment makes as much sense as saying Google is going to disable sideloading on LineageOS and GrapheneOS. Boox doesn't give a flying shit about Google's Android certification program. Google has no claws on devices that have to sideload Play Store.
Is that true for people building off of open source android components (like Boox is doing)? What would you recommend as an alternative? As others have said, I doubt Google can disable sideloading when google play must be sideloaded on the device.
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