English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

00:00

Drugs, you think?

@tchrist OK that is absurd.

Robusto

@tchrist I've been thinking about getting a Proton mail account.

tchrist

@Cerberus Even Putin tolerates Telegram does he not?

Or uses it for surveillance.

Cerberus

@tchrist Most of the time.

@tchrist I used to think, never. But I heard rumours that Durov has visited Putin several times in semi-secret.

tchrist

Bad things happen in the dark.

@Cerberus Think would be too strong a term. I'm just casting aspersions.

Cerberus

> The Kremlin has never made any deals with Telegram boss Pavel Durov, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, adding that he was not aware of any meetings between the tech entrepreneur and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

tchrist

00:04

But he does sometimes seem too hopped up like somebody who's been doing serious club drugs for years.

> The world's wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.

WSJ

Cerberus

I think many people like him use drugs.

tchrist

Hmm

Cerberus

Who?

Ah.

Some of those witnessed could report him.

tchrist

I can't imagine those being more appealing to me if I were a billionaire than when I'm not.

> In a new interview, Elon Musk said prescription ketamine has been helpful in treating his occasional depressive episodes and suggested that taking the drug has been beneficial for investors in his companies.

"prescription"

Cerberus

yahoo.com/news/…

I don't know how reliable this is.

> - In December 2023, the Kremlingram investigation team was anonymously sent an spreadsheet with the data on Pavel Durov's crossings of the Russian border in 2015-2021 which would contradict his official "pariah" narrative.

- We could not confirm the authenticity of this data for a long time

- This week, on August 26, 2024, Russian media Medusa.io wrote about the leak of a large FSB database, and that among them there is a record of Durov's crossing of the Russian border on August 5, 2015

- This completely coincides with one of the entries in the email we received, which contains a tota…

MetaEd

00:31

Wordle 1,168 3/6

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CowperKettle

01:54

New Zealand man of the day:

> An Auckland advertising copywriter brought a clown to his redundancy meeting, as first reported in the New Zealand Herald on Friday. New Zealand legally requires employers to allow workers the option of bringing a support person to serious disciplinary meetings, usually relating to an employee's prospective dismissal.

Neural and Non-Neural AI, Reasoning, Transformers, and LSTMs

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He is best known for his foundational and highly-cited[5] work on long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of neural network architecture which was the dominant technique for various natural language processing tasks in research and commercial applications in the 2010s. He also introduced principles of dynamic neural networks, meta-learning, generative adversarial networks[6][7][8] and linear transformers,[9][10][8] all of which are widespread in modern AI.

Vikas

04:36

Recommend me some new YT ad blockers for Chrome/Edge

Cerberus

Doesn't Ublock Origin work?

Vikas

@Cerberus I never tried. Works on Chrome?

Cerberus

Yes.

Vikas

I thought it is for Firefox only

Let me try

Cerberus

Unless Chrome has recently done something to make it stop working.

Vikas

04:49

@Cerberus Seems like working. Thanks.

Cerberus

Good!

user 20458579510081670432

05:00

Feeling any better pal? @Cerberus

Cerberus

@user20458579510081670432 A bit, my fever is a lot lower.

Only drenched two or three shirts last night.

Thanks for asking.

user 20458579510081670432

Wow! 😲 Two or three?!

👕👕👕🥵🥵🥵🤒🌡️

CowperKettle

@Cerberus I'm sorry to hear that! Get better soon!

CowperKettle

06:04

My runner friend from Kharkiv has just sent me a photo of a destroyed apartment block and said the bomb hit 300 meters from his own apartment block. He ran out to help the victims, but there were already services tending to the wounded.

Several people died.

SmokeDetector

07:46

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, potentially bad keyword in body, potentially bad keyword in title (96): Keuntungan Bermain pada Agen BO IBETOTO Terbaik di Asia‭ by ayolo yolo‭ on english.SE

CowperKettle

08:49

Harry Potter - Redneck Wizard (Official Music Video)

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Cerberus

13:39

@CowperKettle Trying!

@CowperKettle That is pretty terrible.

War is the worst thing.

@user20458579510081670432 Yeah, oh, well. How are you doing?

Robusto

@Cerberus Have you sought medical attention?

Cerberus

13:58

@Robusto No, do you normally see a doctor when you have the flu or Corona?

Robusto

@Cerberus I do if it goes on a long time.

Cerberus

It is within the normal pattern of the flu.

Robusto

If I don't start getting better in two or three weeks I definitely do.

Cerberus

That I can understand.

But I fell ill only a week ago.

Robusto

Ah, I thought it was longer than that.

Cerberus

14:00

And it is already improving.

Robusto

Good!

Cerberus

@Robusto Maybe because I have complained a lot.

Robusto

Hahaha. I generally complain too, if I'm that ill.

#WhenTaken #186 (31.08.2024)

I scored 822/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 100 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 194 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 10 km - 🗓️ 22 yrs - ⚡ 147 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 14 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 335 km - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 187 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 385 km - 🗓️ 32 yrs - ⚡ 95 / 200

https://whentaken.com

Cerberus

Complaining helps!

@Robusto Oh, I should play again. Apparently, the last one is difficult...

Robusto

@Cerberus Yes, you should. And yes, it is.

Cerberus

14:08

@Mitch Who in a school would make such a ranking? Teachers can see the marks of their own pupils, and people like the rectrix and conrectrix can access everyone's marks. But there is no reason to construct some kind of ranking: it would serve no purpose, and it would be seen as inappropriate.

Robusto

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Cerberus

Maybe schools exist where someone has decided to do this; but it would be a bit of a scandal on my school. We are one of the oldest gymnasia in the country. It is not done.

@Mitch But this is only relative to others countries.

@Mitch It isn't, except that many people are being fired because of it. It breeds fear. And you see that the right used it a lot in its anti-left propaganda. That is also why it is dangerous and counter-productive.

Robusto

Daily Octordle #950
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Score: 60

Daily Sequence Octordle #950
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Score: 66

Cerberus

@Mitch Why do you think Normandy spoke all Norse? It was conquered by the Vikings, which happened more than a century earlier, but it was part of the relatively densely populated realm of Charlemagne and France. How many Vikings actually migrated there, compared to the existing population?

Robusto

14:23

@Cerberus Yes. The assimilation was rapid and complete. If I remember right, Rollo, who took over Normandy, was baptized and married Charles the Simple's daughter.

Cerberus

@Mitch As someone once said, language is the most important element of culture. So would the Vikings really have made the Franks switch from their beloved Latin language of culture to a barbarian language of the far north?

@Robusto Right!

So you mean the Vikings were rapidly assimilated into Frankish culture?

Robusto

@Cerberus Yes.

Cerberus

Right.

So some Norse elements they probably retained in their language, and it may have varied depending on the group in society; but altogether they mostly spoke Romance by the year 1066.

Robusto

The early Vikings probably spoke little or no French, but their children certainly would have.

Cerberus

14:50

Right!

user 20458579510081670432

15:15

@Cerberus fine, thanks.

Cerberus

OK, good.

user 20458579510081670432

Is it normal to sweat that much?

Are you losing weight also.

Cerberus

It is normal if you have a kind of fever?

No, I am eating normally.

tchrist

> I urge you to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.

Sermons come on many mounts.

That they might be more widely hearkened to.

user 20458579510081670432

Practice by preaching to the choir.

tchrist

15:32

It sounds more like Gandhi or indeed Jesus, afternotes lingering in their air long after the music has stopped like hard-bought wisdom of the agèd learned only after a long life.

I would not have guessed who it was who uttered those words had I not already known.

Without another sixty years of life first, what eighteen-year old could have come to that understanding?

The entire Stack Overflow Code of Conduct, a tome and contract now longer than the Torah, could be justly restated in just those scant three sentences alone, and be enough.

Bill Clinton said those words.

user 20458579510081670432

At 18?

tchrist

No, at 78.

user 20458579510081670432

He's no Gandhi, that's for sure.

Robusto

@tchrist And whatever happened to "Don't Be Evil"? That was such a potent mission statement, and such a loss when it was retracted.

tchrist

Be it Microsoft, Google, or the Catholic Church.

A Mandela moment.

I mistake myseff: Microsoft never had a "Don't Be Evil" mission statement.

But many another has.

Yet gone astray, forever lost.

Evil has too many axes to drive a stake through its heart forever.

How many non-evil empires can you name from all of history?

user 20458579510081670432

15:46

None.

jlliagre

16:00

#WhenTaken #186 (31.08.2024)

I scored 906/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 469 km - 🗓️ 6 yrs - ⚡ 179 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 14 km - 🗓️ 7 yrs - ⚡ 190 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 3 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 200 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 2438 km - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 141 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 49 km - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 196 / 200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,169 4/6

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Daily Octordle #950
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Cerberus

@tchrist Who are these people?

And where are they?

Is this a metaphor about meeting in the opinion-space?

tchrist

I don't think it is a metaphor.

Cerberus

@tchrist I can hardly imagine the creation of an empire without evil. In the course of time, empires often lose some of their creative evil, though.

@tchrist Is it about politicians going to people's houses during elections?

tchrist

No. It's about how the educated class treats the working class.

It was cited here.

Cerberus

What what is the place where people are?

tchrist

16:13

Well, he's addressing attendees of the Democrats' National Convention. Ostensibly.

@Cerberus Octavian.

jlliagre

Daily Sequence Octordle #950
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Score: 85

tchrist

Or his granduncle.

"Condescension toward working-class voters" is not a way to win them over.

Nor towards anyone.

He was probably forced to write toward there by the copyeditors of the Times. It does not come naturally to me, at last. Towards is what I say and write spontaneously there, unconsciously, as I just now did.

> Michael Sandel, the eminent Harvard philosopher, condemns the scorn for people with less education as “the last acceptable prejudice” in America. He’s right: Elites sometimes indulge in open disdain for working-class voters that they would never acknowledge about other groups.

Patricians versus plebeians. Cavaliers versus roundheads. Gown versus town.

Tower versus field.

jlliagre

@Robusto Gallo-romans and their descendants weren't good at learning new languages and still aren't. Both the Franks and the Vikings couldn't get them to adopt a different one.

alphabet

16:30

@Cerberus The reason is that it compensates for grade inflation. If your GPA is 3.95, it could be because you did very well relative to your peers, or it could be because your school gives As to almost everyone. If your class rank is 5/150, though, it can only mean the former.

Cerberus

@alphabet I don't know what any of this means, but I don't see why you would need to rank children in order to prevent the inflation of grades.

alphabet

But I think most schools avoid calculating it for the reason you cite; it makes things way too competitive--and can mean it's to your disadvantage if other students do well, giving you no incentive to provide them with any sort of help.

Cerberus

We just take the average grade of the central exam of that year, and deduct or add points to the candidates based on that average, according a certain mathematical formula.

@alphabet The point was that it is a more competitive culture.

Appointing someone best in his class is one example of that, it could never be done here.

@tchrist Yeah he killed lots of people too.

alphabet

@Cerberus Central exam?

Cerberus

Of course you can do the same without a central exam, basing it in previous years.

alphabet

16:36

I'm not quite sure what any of your statement means either. Too different a system.

Cerberus

OK, well, details don't matter.

It is a bout a competitive society.

alphabet

Wikipedia provides some background:

> The use of class rank is currently in practice at about less than half of American high schools. Large public schools are more likely to rank their students than small private schools. Because many admissions officers were frustrated that many applications did not contain a rank, some colleges are using other information provided by high schools, in combination with a student's GPA to estimate a student's class rank.

> Many colleges say that the absence of a class rank forces them to put more weight on standardized test scores.

tchrist

Entrance exams are pretty common in many places.

I seem to recall that the civil service entrance exam in Germany in the late 19th century was a brutal thing.

Thinking of Hesse here.

Agrégation

In France, the agrégation (French pronunciation: [aɡʁeɡasjɔ̃]) is the most competitive and prestigious examination for civil service in the French public education system. Successful candidates become professeurs agrégés and are usually appointed as teachers in secondary schools or preparatory classes, or as lecturers in universities. == Context == Originating from the 18th century, the agrégation is a highly prestigious and competitive examination. The level of selectivity varies between disciplines: every year, the French Ministry of National Education determines and publishes a list of annual...

Long history of this.

> The examination requires usually more than a year of preparation. Students of the écoles normales supérieures as well as graduate students who have just completed their master's degree often dedicate an entire year of their curriculum to prepare this examination, enrolling into specific graduate programs.

Robusto

16:53

@jlliagre I don't know that that may be a refutation of my statement. The "Gallo-Romans" were such a mishmash of languages it would be hard to pinpoint any particular trend, I would think.

@tchrist If you think that's brutal, look at the exams the Mandarins had to pass.

tchrist

@Cerberus There will always be competition, or corruption, whenever many desire the same few things.

Robusto

> Grade inflation has made it harder for students to distinguish themselves through academic excellence, prompting them to set themselves apart through superficial participation in numerous extracurricular activities. Moreover, the high cost of tuition has created massive incentives for students, parents, and the larger society to adopt a narrow investment approach to higher education, looking for tangible returns denoted in postgraduate salaries.

The Worst Advice Parents Can Give First-Year Students

> The college years are the best time to take intellectual and experiential risks. It is okay—even good—if some of the choices students make don’t work out. As one of the great psychiatrists at the National Institute of Mental Health once told me: “Growing up is about taking risks, having near misses, making mistakes, and learning from them. Children cannot mature unless they confront and work through serious challenges.”

That was certainly my experience, which lasted well into my 20s. When it came time to make money, I was poised to pursue lucrative undertakings and, in my 40s, with enough wealth to do what I liked, I abandoned one career and picked up another.

tchrist

17:42

@Cerberus How are student speakers selected for graduations there? I'm biased but I doubt that everyone giving the ceremonial salutation and valediction at graduation considers this an honor so much as they do a chore. And I'm certain that no one save at most the speaker himself remembers, much less cares about, such matters after the first few miles down life's road outside the Academy.

Robusto

I just texted someone "I'm going to grab a sabbatical and be right back." I meant "a sandwich," which took six minutes instead of six months.

tchrist

17:57

> The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of
women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif
took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the
early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once
ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were
co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that
after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife,
Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health
until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A

Rome certainly does come up frequently in NYT pieces.

from here

blames Virgil's Aeneid

M.A.R.

18:48

@Robusto this explains a lot of what I read in Academia.SE

People so obsessed about finding the exact niche they want in the exact best department in the exact best university that made me insecure about my uncertainty regarding my own future

Dannyu NDos

19:43

[Original Composition] [SynthV Natsuki Karin] Moody Day

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Mitch

@CowperKettle actually, Schmidhuber is famous in the AI community for 1) in the Q&A after a conference talk (where people present their original research to other experts), telling everybody that he had done what the talk claimed to have done new but years before.amd 2) yes, doing a lot of these ground breaking things many years ago.

So he is famous for public ally feeling underappreciated (but yes all these other important substantive contributions).

@Cerberus the principal (or his office or actually the grading software, surely with lots of security to protect extracting the ordering).

The only purpose a ranking is used for is selecting the top two people who are called the valedictorian and salutatorian respectively, and that is both an honor (like cum laude) and a duty (give a speech at graduation) which I think @tchrist alluded to)

There is no point in ranking (ordering all students) and that order is not used anywhere else but for selecting the top two.

The GPA totally is used as a metric (combined with SAT (standardized test scores in the US) to judge admittance to university. Other countries/schools have other metrics (some qualitative like recommendation letters and such)

It's all competitive everywhere. We're just arguing about how much and how anxious people are about it.

M.A.R.

20:00

@Mitch does the "international GPA" use grades from all courses or just select ones?

Mitch

@Cerberus in the US, DEI is pretty much 'soft' Affirmative Action, which was a legal way to insure that minorities got considered for jobs or government contracts, started back in the 70s. DEI is soft in the sense it's not a law, and it is mostly about preventing harassment in the workplace. People who complain about DEI are essentially complaining about Affirmative Action but with a new label.

M.A.R.

It doesn't make sense for my grades in "analytical history of Islam's dawn" to affect my chances at enrolling in graduate courses somewhere that uses GPA

@Mitch I've always had my doubts about Affirmative Action

Mitch

@Cerberus subjectively I'll grant that, but it's hard to be precise.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus are you all right? Get well soon

Mitch

@Cerberus I agree it seems a little too... Well yeah too competitive an honor (and unlike a race, there are so many variables under and not under the student's control.

There always talk about the one 'grade-grubbing' student who is always going back to the teacher to say they were correct even though the teacher took off points, in order to get them reinstated.

Cerberus

20:12

@tchrist What do you mean?

Mitch

@M.A.R. I don't know about the international GPA or the international baccalaureate stuff. But in US schools, all classes get added in.

Cerberus

@tchrist Each student is spoken to by a teacher who has prepared a personal speech for her. The student does not really speak at graduation.

Do you see now how we lack the whole concept of competing for positions and honours that your schools have?

M.A.R.

@Cerberus that's pretty convenient. Cuts down on Xanax consumption

Or Inderal. But Inderal is more dangerous.

Cerberus

@Mitch No, she wouldn't do that. It would be seen as Anglo-Saxon or perhaps French. Not egalitarian.

Mitch

So there is some strategy that some students take of choosing between an easy class that they can get an A in and a hard class where they might get a B, but the easy class is not considered a good choice, or the collection of nonchallenging classes is deemed not good enough.

M.A.R.

20:15

A few months back some news started circulating in the medical community of a 16-yo boy passing away after a single Inderal dose.

A reminder about the consequences of our lack of restriction on drug purchases.

Cerberus

@Mitch Yes and we do not have that. Can you see how those things are related to inculcating competition, win the context of a school full of children?

Mitch

@M.A.R. it's questionable surely, but without it a lot of very able minorities are overlooked.

M.A.R.

See, almost every drug (practically) counts as Over-the-Counter here.

Cerberus

@Mitch The marks you get on your finals are not very competitive here. You will normally be admitted to any programme provided that you have graduated and that you took the right subjects for the programme.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus there's plenty of nastiness going around even among friends when the competition for our nationwide university entrance exam gets serious for students.

Cerberus

20:17

It doesn't matter whether you got a 5 for Latin or a 10: you can still read classics at any universoty here.

@Mitch I don't know what that is. But do you deny that political correctness works as a red flag on a bull for people on the right and centre?

@M.A.R. Thanks! I think it's just corona. The worst fever is over, just night sweats now. And I hardly smell anything.

Mitch

@Cerberus Yes I agree that people who are more conservative tend to not care for Affirmative Action or DEI because they lean towards not caring about minorities.

Cerberus

@Mitch Well, I didn't even mean to judge the practice here. Just pointing out that American society is more competitive in many ways, and that I think this is part of the reason why its politics are harsher and more polarised.

@Mitch 85% of Americans think political correctness is a problem in society. So, regardless of whether it is morally just, it causes polarisation, it is a big divisive practice.

Mitch

Supposedly the degree of polarization is new, but I've always thought all the sides are at each other's throats. Everywhere.

Cerberus

Everything is always about the degree.

Mitch

We're just arguing about the degree of the degree.

If we're arguing at all.

A kind of no kind of arguing.

M.A.R.

20:25

@Cerberus well same here. The only inaccessible majors are the ones everyone wants: Medicine, pharmacy and dentistry

tchrist

@Cerberus How do you select the few you admit from the many who apply?

M.A.R.

@Mitch that's a very American outlook

tchrist

There's always going to be a scenario where that occurs, resources being finite.

Mitch

And using this talk of polarization to avoid the real issues.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. Right, there are a few programmes that have special requirements. For medicine, you get in if your average is over 8; the rest of the people partake in a kind of lottery to be admitted.

Mitch

20:26

Like did the Vikings who became Normans in Normandy assimilate quickly enough to be totally Romance before they invaded England.

Cerberus

@tchrist You don't select: you hire more people and expand the programme.

Some programmes excepted.

tchrist

Yes, you can become a Classics major provided you've taken the needed courses. But that doesn't mean you get to enter the PhD program of your desire with the advisor of your desire.

To admit all comers that program won't be big enough, and that particular professor will not have time enough.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus well, the situation is apparently even direr in India. Here, roughly 10 out of 650 thousand participants in the nationwide exam end up being accepted into "the three majors". In India, it's roughly the same out of 1.5 million people.

Really feels like gold rush.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. This is actually true haha. To think that people are always at each other's throats is part of the culture: related to the Frontier Mentality, Neo-Liberalism, aversion of Socialism, gun ownership, mistrust of the state, etc., which are all very typically American.

@Mitch Probably not totally, but quite enough.

tchrist

@Cerberus That sounds like what happens with undergrad programs, not graduate ones. It takes a lot more time to build those out.

Cerberus

20:29

@tchrist This was not about PhDs.

tchrist

But you can't just go hiring research professors willy nilly.

M.A.R.

And any actual doctor or pharmacist (dunno about the dentists honestly) will tell you that it's not at all easy to gain the social and financial status the parents of the students covet.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. Ouch. Time to increase capacity. My guess would be that here more than half are admitted to medicine.

tchrist

Half of those who apply are admitted?

Cerberus

I can look it up.

Mitch

20:30

@M.A.R. How does one gain social status?

tchrist

Veterinary schools admit only one in ten.

For example.

So you should not get your hopes up.

> Veterinary school acceptance rates are notoriously competitive, sitting around 10-15% in the US. The competition at the best vet schools is strong, as there are only 32 programs in the US and 5 in Canada, all with limited seats and hundreds to thousands of applicants.

Cerberus

Oh, it is actually 38.7% for medicine. But 49% if you apply at Leiden.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus well, that's the thing. Doctors and pharmacists are vehemently opposed to the idea, not just because we're the ones who made it, but because this whole system is very outdated and can't handle the influx of new doctors. Otherwise, sure, we usually have 1/nth of the number of doctors and pharmacists per capita of western European countries or America.

tchrist

@Cerberus 43% here. That's not completion rate but admittance rate.

M.A.R.

@Mitch by being called Doctor M.A.R. instead of M.A.R.

It might seem silly but that's Asian parents for you, and not just East Asian

Mitch

20:33

I feel like those applicants in the 'other' percent are just not good at judging their worth.

M.A.R.

It might seem silly but that's Asian parents for you, and not just East Asian

tchrist

@M.A.R. Every Jewish mom wants her son to be a doctor. :) (Israel being of course West Asia.)

Cerberus

@M.A.R. The influx of doctors: do you mean the influx of 18-year-old students into the universities, or the influx of fully graduated doctors into the healthcare system? We also have a problem increasing the capacity for medical education, also because there is a shortage in doctors, and you need to hire doctors to educate new doctors.

@tchrist Yes, admittance.

Mitch

@M.A.R. but you get that with the degree.Which is 'easy to get' by just finishing the program.

M.A.R.

@tchrist 0.10 is ridiculously good compared to something like 3/650.

Cerberus

20:34

But, again, medicine is an exception. For any normal programme, you will normally always be admitted as long as you have a valid diploma.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus very few of those 18-yo's will drop out or change majors.

tchrist

@M.A.R. What figure is your 3/650 that from?

M.A.R.

@tchrist almost three of 650 thousand participants are accepted into medicine

Cerberus

@M.A.R. But where is the bottleneck? For us, it is in education. Like other countries, we even import doctors from abroad.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Why don't you have enough medical people?

M.A.R.

20:36

Maybe four. Three into dentistry, and three into dentistry.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Arithmetic fails me there.

M.A.R.

@tchrist well because we're developing and not quite there yet as a country

Maybe regressing. Hard to tell.

Certainly feels like 1980s USSR.

tchrist

You said three into dentistry twice. That's why I can't juggle up the numbers.

M.A.R.

@tchrist whoops

tchrist

@M.A.R. Was it otherwise before the Revolution?

M.A.R.

20:39

These three majors are 'successes' in Konkur. Being accepted into nurse school, whatever it's called, is half a success. The rest are failures. Retake the exam, or roll the dice with some major everyone chides you for never finding 'status' and money in.

tchrist

> The average acceptance rate of nursing school programs in the US in recent years has been around 66%.

And RNs are underpaid.

M.A.R.

> In 1961 the shah dissolved the 20th Majles and cleared the way for the land reform law of 1962. Under this program, the landed minority was forced to give up ownership of vast tracts of land for redistribution to small-scale cultivators.

@tchrist Shah did some pretty amazing things in his last decade.

Huh. I was taught that happened in 1970s

> In 1961 the shah dissolved the 20th Majles and cleared the way for the land reform law of 1962. Under this program, the landed minority was forced to give up ownership of vast tracts of land for redistribution to small-scale cultivators.

@tchrist Shah did some pretty amazing things in his last decade.

tchrist

déjà vu

M.A.R.

Well he did it twice

Thankfully Khomeini saw right through his scheming to become popular and told everyone "Remember people, he sucks!"

tchrist

I remember the Revolution but was too young to understand what was REALLY behind it historically.

Mitch

20:43

It was the CIA

tchrist

And too provincial by far.

Mitch

Even the CIA admits it.

M.A.R.

To be fair he did suck as a person. Though I suppose only as much as anyone from royalty who believes they're owed a kingdom

Mitch

The -one- time the conspiracy theorists were right.

tchrist

@Mitch Pinochet?

Mitch

20:44

Ok there's that

tchrist

It didn't go well for the king of Cuba either.

M.A.R.

But seriously, without those reforms, Iran would still have been sorta feudal.

tchrist

But they have lots of doctors.

@M.A.R. Sounds like it.

M.A.R.

As late as 1962.

alphabet

@Mitch At some schools they do calculate a "class rank"--not a public list, but they'll tell you you're e.g. the 20th-best student in the class. These do often get provided to colleges when available.

Mitch

20:46

@tchrist OK but that's it.

Maybe a couple more

tchrist

@Mitch For polyamorous senses of couple.

Mitch

None that really matter much

alphabet

@Mitch Not to mention all the BS essays where you pretend to be thrilled about the school you least want to attend, plus adding extracurriculars that you barely attemd to make yourself seem at least somewhat interesting.

tchrist

Well before us the world had the Brits mucking things up.

M.A.R.

@alphabet our new dean has started declaring on the billboard publicly the top ranks of every term and even as the class's 2nd rank I feel stressed and annoyed about it

tchrist

20:48

Again, non-evil empires, anyone?

Mitch

@alphabet and these matter for competitive programs/universities and don't matter as much for non-competitive ones.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Leaderboards should really come with Lederhosen.

alphabet

@Cerberus Here you can graduate high school while learning almost nothing. Gotta keep those graduation rates high.

Cerberus

Sad.

Mitch

@alphabet "Dear {university_name} admissions committee, I am so glad to be..."

M.A.R.

20:49

Eh, it's almost over anyway

tchrist

> As you begin or continue your nursing education, we will be there to support you every step of the way. The University of Northern Colorado School of Nursing assures a high-quality, evidence-based education that is taking our discipline to the next level of patient care.

Admission to the BSN program is a competitive process. Specifics for application screening and selection criteria are located in the application materials. For each application cycle, 72 applicants are admitted to the BSN - Traditional program and 36 applicants are admitted to the BSN - 2nd Degree program. The number of …

Mitch

@M.A.R. Americans are laid back in comparison.

Cerberus

There is always competitive and more competitive.

Cf. China.

alphabet

@M.A.R. Find the first one and kill them, it's your only option.

M.A.R.

@Mitch one annoying thing about it is there's quite a bit of grade inflation going on at the junior years or what you might call them so we always look bad regardless

Mitch

20:53

Iceland? Pfft parents there are happy if their high school graduates can tie their shoe laces.

alphabet

@Mitch Yes, there seems to be a fairly sharp line between "very difficult to get into" and "very easy to get into," with state schools being universally in the latter category.

tchrist

@Cerberus 3.3 billion Indo-Chinese can't be wrong.

M.A.R.

@alphabet oh he's my friend. Guy's like a goddamn sponge. Remembers things said in passing in class years ago.

I have not hatched an elaborate plan to eliminate him from the competition

Cerberus

@tchrist That's a funny ethic group.

Mitch

@alphabet UC Berkeley isn't so easy.

tchrist

20:55

Yeah, they dominate the standup comedy clubs.

Mitch

Or any of the flagship state university campuses.

Cerberus

alphabet

@Mitch Right, yeah.

Cerberus

@Mitch I'm still stuck in a Wiki chain.

These are open tabs.

alphabet

I don't actually know what the distribution is.

Cerberus

20:56

I have always read and closed like 20 articles today.

The article on the War of the Sicilian Vespers is looong.

But cool.

M.A.R.

@alphabet it's the opposite here since we have studying in a 'state program' is free, and otherwise it's not.

tchrist

Speaking of Pax Nicephori, I've got this guy at work I continually misunderstand because he merges Tex/tax, pecks/packs etc. He says them all the same way and cannot hear the difference when others say them differently. What ugly new merger is this one?

M.A.R.

Something went wrong somewhere since I'm studying alongside people that have not managed to enroll in a state program, so we're classmates but they pay tuition fees and I don't

Cerberus

@tchrist Maybe Dutch.

M.A.R.

That's a beautiful Iranian homemade system at work.

tchrist

20:58

@Cerberus He's from south Texas.

Cerberus

Do they have a town names Holland?

tchrist

Hah. And anglo not latino.

They might.

Cerberus

By the way, when do you use south and when southern? It's Question time!

M.A.R.

Taxas

alphabet

@M.A.R. Here the state-run universities are also cheaper, but they're generally very large and have reasonably high acceptance rates.

Cerberus

20:59

Hah.

Mitch

@Cerberus what is Nicephori? Yes I can Google but you're already there!

tchrist

All my axes live in taxes.

M.A.R.

@Mitch it's probably some green shrub.

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