[ExI] US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 
…

 

>…Now… we have a lot of stay-at-home workers, but that too creates a gap, actually an even bigger one.  Time is money.  Once you start adding up all the time not spent on the road…spike

 

 

Mike there is a reason why I think about this a lot.  I do a lotta volunteer work at the local high school, but I am not the charitable soul that makes me sound like.  I work only with elite students, for a reason: I am qualified.  I can teach them engineering and calculus and physics and stuff their teachers don’t know because in general the teachers don’t have real-world experience.  So… I work with the Science Olympiad team, the competition math teams, scouts, such as that, the elite students only.  I give my time and effort to the already-haves rather than the have-nots because I…don’t…know… how the heck to help unmotivated or slow-learning students.  So… they are happy to have me work with the elites.  It’s the easiest volunteer job in the world.

 

When the covid shutdowns happened, the school was closed for a bit over a year.  It was then the gap went from huge to Grand Canyon sized chasm.  Some students made stepping stones into stumbling blocks, others managed to find ways to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.  Some got with it and came back farther ahead than they were.  Others accomplished nearly nothing, for some, exactly nothing.  Some were so disengaged they went into reverse.  The gap is huge, and… now that school is back in sesh, it gets still bigger, because those who made good use of that time of closed schools got really good at finding things on their own.  Schools have gotten really good at this:  they have acknowledged that schools have eagles and pigeons.  Now they let the eagles soar.

 

This has consequences.  

 

This whole discussion goes back to the IQ notion in which I didn’t comment but I will: our task of measuring IQ has gone from difficult to more difficult.  Our modern society has externalized knowledge and skills to where the most critical intellectual ability is to know how to find out stuff, how to learn from online sources, how to focus long enough to learn what you need there.  This is the new IQ, and I don’t know how the heck that can be effectively measured, but… I haven’t been convinced that real intelligence is declining.  Test scores on traditional IQ tests probably are declining, but society I think is getting collectively smarter.

 

spike

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