The Doom Thread: Gloom, Despair, Agony

So, will the projected summer of 2025 recession (with a flow chart!) result in enlightenment to the MAGA faithful? How many quarters can we blame on Biden and Obama?

 

Remember, these people blamed the Katrina response and the Great Recession on Obama.

 

The Republicans are the party of personal responsibility. Someone else has to take personal responsibility for everything they do.

 

We are fvcked

"CNBC's Jim Cramer says there won't be a U.S. recession."

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It's just the expected end of the road for the American culture.

At some point, we still held those old-fashioned continental dreams of being a good person, of bettering ourselves and our communities, of earning a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, of working hard and earning it. We used to dislike the idle rich - especially those silver spoon children who never worked a day in their lives.

That's all done. The rich - no matter how they earned it - are better than we are and should be able to do whatever they want. A degree is just something you pay for with tens of thousands of dollars and a few years of your life - check that degree box - and is a means to higher paying job (if you get the right degree!) and nothing else. No self-inspection, no "liberal education" of literture and philosophy and decision-making, etc.

 

I want to give you a terrorist fist-bump but I also want to puke

 

I got an email from them today that used a crying emoji in the subject line to beg me to resubscribe. If they had only mentioned this timely reboot!

 

Read it? I just got done grading student papers this week, so I lived it.

At least a quarter were clearly AI generated. And they’re easy to grade since they didn’t do the assignment properly (in a class on The American Short Story, don’t include “analyses {really, they were summaries} of stories by Chekhov or Kafka, or stories by Americans who were not in the anthology)

 

If we had a government that enforced “truth in advertising” regulations, colleges and universities would be required to stop referring to themselves by those words and to start calling themselves “Credentialing Farms” or “Maturation Chambers for AI Supplementation Units

 

A little too wordy for a band name, but pretty great all the same.

 

All those old shows you received for free. Now you have to pay on so many streaming services.

 

I guess i have to buy the magazine.

 

This summed it up for me:

I had that conversation many times before I retired last month.

 

I heard Sarah Isgur yesterday talking about AI being akin to a calculator. Originally seen as an unallowable crutch for students, and later taken in stride.

It's a quantum difference. Calculator does what you tell it, faster than you can. AI interprets your prompt and does its own thing. Certainly not your thing.

I don't see Jarvis, I see Skynet.

 

I saw it in my student lifetime, where the books transitioned from having you integrate and differentiate to find the min & max and all that fun stuff, to learning how to just enter it into the TI-89 and writing down the answer.

 

I was thinking also about how when you first learn calculus you have to calculate everything the long way, but then it's revealed you can just drop all exponents by one. Not a crutch, something you can use once you understand what's going on.

 

There is an easy answer for this, but both the tech bros and the instructors won't do it.

Go back in time. Use "Traditional Exam Booklets."

For every exam, you get three or four of those little yellow or blue books and write your response. I remember taking advanced calculus finals in those little blue books, as well as getting hand cramps from writing dissertations on some random book I read in literature class.

TBH, I'm pretty sure the TA graded all my papers - not sure why the institutions are so against going back to paper-based assignments and stuff. Earlier this week I explained to my 16 year old son that we had a week or two to do a research paper - go to the library, check out every book on the subject, then skim through them all for good quotes. Then write the paper.

He gets two hours to research on the internet. Of course he wants to use AI.

 

That doesn't work too well with online classes.

 

That's partly how I can tell who is using AI. I have their bluebooks from earlier in class exams.

But like Sounder says, that won't work for online classes. Which is why I'm not teaching summer classes.

 

When I took one of the CISSP security classes at home, I had to pan my laptop camera around the room to show that there was no other person in the room and I couldn't open any other tabs or programs during the test. Remote proctoring.

There are also local test-taking locations for similar courses across the country where people (remote students) can drive to their local test-taking center and be proctored as they take their paper book tests. We can do this!

 

Crap, I just realized this is the Doom thread, not the education thread.

I can assure you, the job as a remote or in-person remote proctor will be terrible, with little to no pay, no benefits, and will only exist to test potential government employees on the purity test questions about election results and tariff successes.

Hail Grimes!!!