Kyle Schwarber was the first player of the Chicago Cubs 2016 “core” to leave, not even given an offer to stay, and he was had the most success since that World Series of all the players who were on that team, winning two more World Series and now the 2025 MLB All-Star MVP. How he came back from knee surgery that kept him out of the 2016 season to contribute in a big way in that playoff run was plain evidence of his unique abilities. Not trying to find a way to keep him was negligence.
Doc Searls On Education
Doc Searls has a blog post that both demonstrates an effective use of ChatGPT and has insights on education in the United States. I added this comment:
I think there is one important part missed here regarding thoughts on learning. Society in the United States establishes intelligence (IQ) as a constraint on learning, but is not and one might argue that intelligence isn’t a real thing. The constraint on learning in the United States, which I think is implicit in all of the above but not explicit is motivation. Children motivated to learn will learn and likely will see learning as fun. Highly motivated children will route around the problems of the current system. Unmotivated children will not learn and will not see the value in learning.
Motivation comes from parents, which makes good parenting so important to society. Problem is the United States society is basically in opposition to parents mostly because those who influence our society want a narrow definition of good parenting and support only that definition.
Why would anyone seriously think the billions of dollars earmarked for the Department of Homeland Security will actually go towards what is said it will be used for? My bet is a small fraction will go toward ICE agent salaries and the vast majority will go toward the existent and persistent “military industrial complex” that views the states of the Union as a new market. Follow. the. money.
There are two fundamentals of a blog, one is that it is a web page and the other is that the page includes links. A linkblog is a special form of blog the soul purpose of which is the sharing of links to other web pages and therefore contains only the titles of the source pages and a link to them and no real commentary related to the links. All blogs contain links but usually include commentary, hopefully in the voice of a human author. Because the purpose of linkblogs is sharing and the purpose of RSS is sharing, the alignment and perhaps even the dependency of one on the other is natural, but the RSS feed is only useful with a RSS feed reader whereas the linkblog is useful in every web browser. In some ways the focus on the RSS feed is anti web. Mastodon, Bluesky, and other timelines are conceptually RSS feed readers but I do not think they are the web.
Every time I see a new “productivity app” announced I think to myself why? Humans are not robots. I want more art and less productivity. In mean time I just need to be able to record stuff and retrieve stuff from anywhere.
Finished reading: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield 📚This book is full of useful nuggets. I particularly like the author’s point of view on fundamentalism and ego.
If we have an issue with birth right citizenship, which the founders did not have, then perhaps there should be requirements for citizenship for all. Like you have to pass a test, make a pledge, maybe even serve the public for a period of time.
Freedom is fundamental to Christianity, its doctrines assume humans are free to choose whether or not to be “saved.” And yet a majority of Christians in the United States want to impose their beliefs upon others and therefore deny their freedom. Isn’t this is a sin against the Spirit that Jesus taught? Are you on the side of God or Pharaoh?
The latest release of Wordland now supports linkblogs. I created a new Wordpress site for my linkblog and there is a corresponding RSS feed. You can add this feed to your micro.blog timeline or any RSS feed reader. The RSS feed works as expected but the posts to the WordPress site do not currently include the source links and I have filed a bug report. I also discovered in testing this that the Wordland RSS feeds is per Wordpress site so the linkblog feed is separate from the general posts that I have been publishing.