garrettw87

garrettw87, 9 months ago

Can we all put our clicks together and make an effort to erase the swastika around (70,857)

garrettw87, 9 months ago

Is this something I should Google, or…. maybe I shouldn’t?

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Do you need to? No. But I do have accounts on both and will keep it that way, because they’re just completely different experiences and Kbin isn’t to a point yet IMO to fully replace Mastodon on the client level.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Probably going to get downvoted for this, but I tend to agree that AA, as it stood, had run its course. Getting rid of it now clears the way for new and better solutions.

When I read these excerpts from this article https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-action/ - I get a strong sense that AA really just allowed schools to be lazy.

“Universities all across the country will begin to experiment with a whole variety of admissions techniques that are race-neutral in the sense that race is not an explicit factor, but not race-neutral in the sense that they’re intended to produce diversity,” says Jeremy R. Paul, a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.

Paul says many universities are going to have to up their recruitment efforts, increase partnerships with community colleges and high-poverty high schools, and invest more in scholarships and financial aid.

“These are things that universities will want to do anyway, because they’re good things to do,” Paul says.

Dan Urman, director of the law and public policy minor at Northeastern, who teaches courses on the Supreme Court, says the ruling means that universities will have to redouble their efforts to maintain diverse student bodies. Urman says there are examples of states opting out of affirmative action policies to mixed results.

“My home state of California abolished affirmative action in 1996 in a vote called Proposition 209, and California universities spent a lot of time and resources recruiting, establishing programs,” he says. “They were able to get diversity, not back to where it was before … but let’s say they were able to avoid some of the worst predictions of what would happen to diversity.”

One potential solution to maintain diversity are so-called percentage plans, where students who graduate at the top of their classes at each respective high school are guaranteed spots in universities. The first percentage plan was signed into law in 1997 in Texas by then-Gov. George W. Bush. It permits any student from “a Texas public high school in the top 10% of his or her class to get into any Texas public college, without any SAT or ACT score.”

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Affirmation action mandates a historically and currently racist society to demonstrate commitment to end subversive racist policies.

Maybe, but with some amount of collateral damage that will never be truly avoidable, because it’s still a system explicitly based on race. Society can never fully heal under a system like that. It can make some progress, but that progress has arguably already been largely achieved and somewhat plateaued; continuing an upward trajectory now requires different tactics.

Declaring everyone equal under the law doesn’t begin to put forth the required effort to actually make the country a more equitable place.

That was true at one point, but a lot has changed since that time.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

I’m not so sure. I understand your cynicism but I don’t share it just yet.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

This is how the Fediverse is. That said, I’m pretty sure there is functionality being worked on in some way to accomplish exactly what you are looking for.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Lol. Good one

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Waze editor here. Based on the article’s content, this post’s title is a bit of an overreaction. Google would be a fool to kill off a platform with more accurate street maps than its core platform, maintained by a vibrant group of volunteers, at least without creating or migrating those tools over to GMaps.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

No, I didn’t realize that. Sorry.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

I would argue that the federation is the platform.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

I see you’re on a different Kbin instance. Was this intended to be a threaded reply, out of curiosity? Because it shows up as a top-level comment on the post for me.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Yes, but my bigger point is that it’s not threaded as a reply to one of that user’s comments.

Edit: Oops, nevermind. I saw their comments elsewhere down here but didn’t realize they were OP. Just one of the interface things on Kbin that needs improvement.

Edit 2: I need to figure out how to do strikethrough text on here

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Read some of the other comments. It doesn’t sound like you’ve been following much of the chatter about the site very closely.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Ernest has brought a server admin on board for this reason. Also a number of contributors are actively working on improving the setup process.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

I don’t think most people have any problem with Reddit taking steps toward profitability. The whole time it’s always been about how they’re going about it, and how the fallout could have been far less bad if he had approached everything a little differently (such as: more realistic/less oppressive API pricing, giving warning of changes much farther in advance to allow 3P apps time to adjust, and behaving himself a lot better when interacting with people about the changes).

garrettw87, 10 months ago

It's too bad they decided to memorialize the name "r/blind" containing the "r" in their domain, but I can understand why.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

Not quite that easy, unfortunately, as we don’t have an API yet, but it is being worked on.

garrettw87, 10 months ago

kbin sounds like a hex editor for KDE

That's what I needed to hear today. genius

garrettw87, 11 months ago

Federation was turned back on well before this was posted. Like probably a day or two or three ago.