I am sympathetic to the idea that contemporary views on imperialism are overly-focused on its downsides and blind to its upsides. "What did the Romans ever do for us?" etc.
But I find these arguments a bit tired. I'm not familiar with Sati but I know the Indian subcontinent has been civilized, if not united, for thousands of years. The British brought different values and culture, for sure, and a plethora of benefits. But I can't agree that they had a "civilizing effect" on a people who already lived in a civilization.
> Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples
You can't trot out Kipling's "white man's burden" without at least acknowledging the historical and racial context around it. And in my opinion, justifying imperialism because it's civilizing a lesser people is a sure route to the cruelest forms of domination via chauvinism and white supremacism.
I think it would be better justified as a sort of corporate merger: Your company organization sucks and we think we can get better outcomes for both companies if we put your company under our management.
> The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade.
This is true. At the dawn of the industrial age, those pioneers of industry outlawed their chief competition in the most noble, high-minded, and selfless act of compassion in human memory.
> The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite
Also true. Of course, they then proceeded immediately to set about extorting and exploiting the locals.
If you mean releasing model weights: They won't, because they know the "shill something" vector will get abliterated immediately. And they can't use trade secrets or copyright to stop it, either, because they released the model themselves and you don't need to redistribute weights, just an adblocker LoRA.
I agree with everything you wrote about maladministration of California's math curricula, but:
> since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil
funding for public education (excluding college, I think).
This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil spending in 2023[0].
California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98) and schools are funded through both property taxes (affected by Prop 13) and general funds via the LCFF, which directs extra funds towards schools with more disadvantaged students.
In fact, funding levels keep hitting record after record, with only mandatory Prop 98 spending rising from $59B in 2013-14[1] to $127.1B in 2026-27[2], despite an enrollment decline of ~7% over that period[3].
This is interesting news to me, thank you. I'm curious if the per-pupil spending includes locally raised funds; the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor, and districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate. So public schools function as local charities and inevitably have fundraising arms to make up the shortfall. This has been true since at least the 1980s when I was in school, and is definitely still true today.
> the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor
No, it really isn't. Again, just mandated Prop 98 state spending on K-12 is $127.1B for next year, with this year's enrollment at just about 5.8 million students. That works out to $21k per pupil not including all discretionary state spending, federal spending, and other local funding (like the fundraising you're talking about).
> districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate
Since 2013, under the LCFF, districts with a very high amount of property tax revenue only get "basic aid" from the state, but this is only a small fraction of school districts. Anyway the funding disparity is the entire point of the LCFF: The idea is to give rich districts less and poor districts more.
It's frustratingly difficult to get my fellow Californians to understand that our schools are, if anything, over-funded, and that throwing ever more money into the black hole is unlikely to improve our abysmal outcomes.
Well I live in a basic aid district; Bay Area but firmly middle class. We’re just above the cutoff for federally subsidized school lunches iirc, and the schools are chronically short on money.
Part of it is declining enrollment, part of it is Baumol’s cost disease (a living wage is pretty high here! Teachers get paid well on a national scale and very poorly on a local scale).
But yeah… education is simply not well-run in California. I find that pretty indisputable.
Your situation is a good argument against the equity-focused LCFF. It's such a HCOL area that despite having high property tax revenue vs. the rest of the state, your district really should be funded at a higher level. Unfortunately I have little hope of Californians abandoning their zeal for punitive equity any time soon.
It is indeed indisputable that education is not well-run here. But it's not going to be easy to fix. For starters, nearly 100% of the people I talk to about this issue believe, like you, that the problem is Prop 13 and underfunded schools. I don't know where this idea came from but it's remarkably pervasive and consistent across demographics.
But the biggest problem IMO is that the education administration mafia has a stranglehold on our one-party state and things are broken just the way they like it.
Your comment prompted to look into this further, thank you. The funding situation in California is complicated and weird, but yes, CA does spend a lot of money on public education.
There are weird relics of the underfunded past, but you can’t blame the educational failures on lack of budget.
> copy [the] educational plan California used back in the 1970's
I think that would go a long way.
> more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster
Wrong funding disaster. The real funding disaster is Prop 98, which mandates a certain amount of K-12 spending according to "the level of funding in 1986-87, General Fund revenues, per capita personal income, and school attendance". [0]
Specifically, "[...] [T]he Guarantee is in a Test 1 for all years 2024-25 through 2026-27. This means that the funding level of the Guarantee in these years is equal to roughly 40 percent of General Fund revenues, plus local property tax revenues. Pursuant to the Proposition 98 formula, this percentage of General Fund revenues is not reduced to reflect enrollment adjustments, which further increases per pupil funding." [0]
Additionally, both property tax revenues (affected by Prop 13) and general fund revenues are used to fund the LCFF[1], which is big on "equity" and gives schools with high ESL and generally disadvantaged students significantly more funds. It also guarantees funding growth with COLA and population growth adjustments.
Finally, on top of all that mandatory funding, we're spending discretionary funds to more than double outlays on special education vs. FY18-19[0]--which is claimed to be an investment in student outcomes. And discretionary funds for professional development. And discretionary funds to pay staff 14 weeks pregnancy leave. And discretionary funds to give LCFF a nearly doubled "super COLA".
The state doesn't have a funding problem, it has a spending problem. And the result of this unchecked spending growth is that mandatory Prop 98 spending alone is now a record $127.1B vs $59B in 2013-14 and $78.5B in 2018-19[2]--despite a ~7% enrollment decline over that period[3]. Meanwhile outcomes have plummeted.
The education administration mafia has the state over a barrel. Yet somehow most Californians believe that education is underfunded, usually with a dash of "something something Prop 13". But actually the problem is closer to a resource curse. With ever-growing guaranteed slices of the budget and discretionary sweeteners up the wazoo, who needs to actually teach kids?
AKA what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever.
I guess this is like medical researchers "discovering" basic calculus or an office worker discovering that SFTP, sshfs, and git work fine and they don't need Dropbox after all.
What's common knowledge in one field can apparently still be alien to people outside the field, even in the age of LLMs.
Just wait until the author finds out about Overleaf...
I hope the negative reactions here are to the truncated title (HN drops the “How” from titles). The author doesn’t seem to be claiming anything revolutionary, just describing how they created their pipeline.
Good grief.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Author here. You're exactly right. All of my pre-grad education was liberal arts. I had never once heard of LaTeX until I entered the software world years later, and even then only from a coworker with a CS PhD.
Considering LaTeX came from legendary CS PhD and Turing award winner Leslie Lamport's need to typeset a book, and was built on the shoulders of legendary CS PhD and Turing award winner Donald Knuth's work on TeX, I think "techbros" can safely pat themselves on the back as innovators in this case.
I said CS PhD students have been doing this forever, and you dismissed that as techbros patting themselves on the back. But once I pointed out that LaTeX was created by Serious People, apparently CS PhDs aren't techbros any more.
So which is it? And who exactly do you think is a self-congratulatory techbro here?
I believe "dark triad" personality traits are significantly over-represented among CEOs vs. the general population. IMO it's likely that these traits are positively selected by shareholder capitalism and traditional corporate structures.
> my browsing traffic doesn't hit the NSA - only my encrypted VPN traffic does
I mean, let's be real.
All known US VPN servers and Tor exit nodes--and probably all US Tor relays regardless of exit policy--are going to be considered a totally legitimate "communications facility" target for the warrantless wiretapping system due to exactly the scenario you just posited.
From that perspective you'd be better off using US residential proxies. Of course, while they'll never admit it in court, NSA just does whatever they want, laws be damned, and are almost certainly logging everything. So while such a scheme might theoretically hinder the introduction of evidence in a court case, it doesn't really matter; NSA is still gonna see your traffic and they're still gonna either drone strike you or "parallel construction" your ass, anyway.
But the US also limits their patronage of other businesses whose owners shop at the store. And because the US is such a rich and great customer, while Cuba is broke and their shop has empty shelves, other business owners generally avoid going to CubaMart.
It's not a blockade, and everyone involved is simply exercising their sovereign rights. But it is mildly coercive. Which, obviously, is the whole point.
Right, but the point is, it's not a blockade. Loads of people are calling it a blockade, and correcting that piece of misinformation is the root of this whole thread.
If people want to say that the embargo is coercive and bad, that's fine.
But I find these arguments a bit tired. I'm not familiar with Sati but I know the Indian subcontinent has been civilized, if not united, for thousands of years. The British brought different values and culture, for sure, and a plethora of benefits. But I can't agree that they had a "civilizing effect" on a people who already lived in a civilization.
> Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples
You can't trot out Kipling's "white man's burden" without at least acknowledging the historical and racial context around it. And in my opinion, justifying imperialism because it's civilizing a lesser people is a sure route to the cruelest forms of domination via chauvinism and white supremacism.
I think it would be better justified as a sort of corporate merger: Your company organization sucks and we think we can get better outcomes for both companies if we put your company under our management.
> The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade.
This is true. At the dawn of the industrial age, those pioneers of industry outlawed their chief competition in the most noble, high-minded, and selfless act of compassion in human memory.
> The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite
Also true. Of course, they then proceeded immediately to set about extorting and exploiting the locals.
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