Wow, what a wonderful bit of storytelling and great insight into the very weird social and political landscape of Michigan.
I love the photo of the Muma's, happy they were on the right side of history when it mattered.
And this stands out, “We feel that they have been put here … to ‘brain wash’ our children into accepting a mixed marriage as natural. We will never accept a mixed marriage as being right.”
Sound familiar? Assholes never change, they just shift their target.
CEO of public company actively makes product worse because of business dealings at a seperate private company owned by said CEO. Not that Tesla shareholders don't already have enough reason to be pissed, but good lord.
And it's not a "feud" that would imply Disney is being petty instead of making the fucking obvious business decision to pull advertising spend from the dumpster fire of racism and controversy that is Twitter.
The Online Safety Act has taught the Tories that they can get away with anything if they can spin it as "think of the children". I expect to see more draconian limiting of speech under this same guise.
ETA: and after reading the article, the argument of protecting kids mental health is BS. If they cared about mental health they'd fund the NHS so that wait times to see a psychiatrist/therapist reflected the urgency. Social media might add fuel to the fire, but depression doesn't just magically go away if you delete your accounts.
This is generally what I came to say, except to add that Gen Z is giving me (old millennial) some hope. We were frogs in the pot, but it's a rolling boil and zoomers like Greta, David Hogg, and the 12 year old who interrupted COP28 seem alright.
Ultimately, I'm determined to break the cycle of previous Gen calls current Gen lazy. These kids are alright and I wish we had left them better.
If we had more funding for great teachers, it would be anything but pre-work. Ultimately, lower income families really benefit from free childcare schools provide, and a good pre-K classroom is all about play and exploring.
Teaching at that level should be fun for kids and teachers (though also exhausting). It's when underfunding forces teachers into a solid 8h of classroom time a day with a way too large class size that it turns work-like.
I freelanced music ed and worked with 4-8 year olds in several different schools. Some were amazing, supportive teaching assistants and reasonable schedules with a few breaks in my day, kids loved it and so did I. Others, I felt like a warden just trying to stop a riot for 9 hours straight with a 20min lunch. 25+ 4 year olds with no support doesn't work.
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of "creativity" in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it's why copyright law is so complex in music).
It's the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn't. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).
So in the end, they are "creative" but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
My thoughts exactly, someone feed that void!!