“In 2000, Prevost allowed Father James Ray, an Augustinian priest, to reside at St. John Stone Friary in Chicago. Ray had been suspended from public ministry since 1991 due to credible accusations of sexual abuse of minors. Although the priory was close to a Catholic elementary school, Prevost did not notify the school administration about Ray. The Augustinians noted that Ray was assigned a monitor while at St. John Stone. Ray was moved to a different residence in 2002 when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted stricter rules for handling priests accused of abusing minors.”

The augustinians, led by him at one point, have continued to lack transparency, only last year finally releasing a list of offenders 20 years later (which omitted members whose accusers did not meet “their standards”)

Also choice quotes from him:

“Something that needs to be said also is that ordaining women—and there’s been some women that have said this interestingly enough—‘clericalizing women’ doesn’t necessarily solve a problem, it might make a new problem,”

“In a 2012 address to bishops, he lamented that Western news media and popular culture fostered “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel.” He cited the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.”

As bishop in Chiclayo, a city in northwestern Peru, he opposed a government plan to add teachings on gender in schools. “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,” he told local news media.”

Yeah, super likable

he’s homophobic and a pedophile enabler so they’ll come to like him soon enough

If I am murdered please don’t do this. I do not care if you feel like it will help you process the events

Even here I’ve posted about how advertising is a destructive force that ruins everything it touches and literally should not exist and there are people that are so indoctrinated by the industry that they rush to defend it

“But how will small businesses prosper without the ability to annoy you with direct mail marketing and Facebook campaigns!”

And truly misunderstanding the difference between something like a business directory, that you willing submit yourself to as a consumer, and can be listed and compiled objectively without competitive advantage for rich assholes, vs advertising, which intrudes on your life.

Well like I said I’m not outright denying its efficacy, but based on initial reactions the guy is marketing it like pseudoscience and should maybe work on clarifying what his method actually is

The problem is that the description of the teaching method, at least in the theory course, was completely devoid of any rationale for how it is different from any other method of teaching (same as the website)

I have no reason to believe his app and courses don’t provide instruction. My issue is with his grandiosity without substance. An educator of all people should recognize the need to substantiate their claims. This, coupled with the fact that the first thing I am hit with on his site being:

“ABSOLUTELY MAGICAL"

“PURE GENIUS”

“TRULY A MASTERPIECE”

“SERIOUSLY THE BEST LANGUAGE COURSES EVER”

“INSANELY CRAZY GOOD” “LITERALLY CHANGED MY LIFE”

“BLOWN AWAY”

“A TOTAL GAME CHANGER”

“PHENOMENAL”

“WORLD-CLASS”

(None of which are attributed to anyone, of course) makes me really skeptical.

It’s really hard to beat flash cards. I like Anki a lot because it codifies them and makes the process of “have I mastered this” a bit more streamlined. Though I feel like a lot of people just download premade decks and while that’s fine you learn a lot making the deck. You can’t get around hours of studying vocab and grammar, especially if you’re after the critical period (which I would hope everyone posting here is)

The gameification that Duolingo brings is valuable and very motivating for a lot of people. The problem is that over the years like many capitalist ventures Duolingo made language learning secondary to earning income. So the primary goal of the app suffers at the expense of keeping you constantly engaged so that you’re far more likely to buy shit even if that means ultimately dont learn all that much

This is interesting, thanks

Edit: I take it back. I had some time after work and the app appears to be a collection of lectures from the founder who does not actually speak each language, but feels their teaching method is so unique that it overcomes this. Looking at the website there is no actual description of what makes their method different or better, just a lot of fluff and boasting about how it’s so great. I didn’t speak any of the languages to review content but I do have a background in music so I listened to the 12 minute music theory lesson 1 and it was just him gushing about how great his method is, 0 theory covered. Maybe it is revolutionary but this reeks of pseudoscience

Hint books were an experience back then. I remember the hint book for myst had this whole narrative about some other person who got trapped in the book, which was supposed to be like the player. It was this whole story of how they solved all the various puzzles. I remember it being quite long but I was also like 9 so maybe it was just like 10 pages

Duolingo sucks for language learning

Slow input method with the word bank which really doesn’t matter early on but becomes a chore that slows progress later on

Doesn’t really do much in the way of correcting errors unless you pay money for the highest level subscription and even then the error correction is weak. A platform like Duolingo has the potential to do really cool error correction; to literally point out the exact error you made and tie it to an explanation. Obviously that’s difficult especially as things become more challenging but duo has had a decade and millions in development funds, which they’ve spent making the courses actively worse to drive up subscription costs and iaps

The lessons are so focused on the whole “gameification” thing that unless you specifically go back to constantly practice vocabulary (and if applicable characters) you will never retain anything. If you merely pound through a Duolingo course from a-b on the prescribed “path” you will struggle immensely and forget tons of early vocabulary and grammar concepts that are introduced and then never brought back unless you seek them out. There are “weak skills” lessons but they are relatively uncommon so you can feel like you’re constantly progressing

The word banks similarly don’t necessarily test retention and just test your ability to do a quick game of matching

You’ll learn something but if you truly want to learn a language there are far more efficient ways. Duolingo is a practice tool at best

More like the focus group thought the masks were “super gay fauci shit” so home depot went with “guy wearing $2 safety glasses that don’t even have a dust seal”

I’ve never had a gold leaf thing, aside from a shot of goldschlager, but I have wondered this

Maybe the next time I make a dessert I’ll pick up some flavorless, odorless gold to really take my treat to the next level. What a stupid trend

yes obviously

your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.

When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume

The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.

And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.

this argument is so fucking dumb

Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream

SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.

SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000 Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000

Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.

A conviction rate of over 99% and 99.8% in criminal cases strongly suggests a combination of not pursuing justice in many cases, outright framing people when necessary, and abusive behavior by police to force confessions for the need to solve cases.

I can speak somewhat passable Japanese and I’ve made a few close friends in Japan on trips there and online but I don’t think I could live there given some of the serious systemic issues with their justice and political system. That said I’m coming from America so who the fuck am I to talk I suppose

gonna be wild to see what this thing costs with tariffs

All those old games were so punishingly hard

You’d play leisure suit Larry or whatever and get 3/4 of the way through and get stuck. Then you’d check a walkthrough and realize you didn’t check the trash can on the first screen of the game for a key item and now you’re fucked and literally have to start over from the beginning

Or you’d get to a death condition and get a screen that just mocks you: remember to save early and save often!

Yeah, basically every game that runs on scummvm is a good candidate here: leisure suit Larry, kings quest, police quest, the dig, sam and max, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, all the sierra and lucasarts ones

Myst series is another good one. Journeyman project trilogy. These all ruled when I was like 12 years old

I miss when games were confusing and aimless by default. I know there are still games like this but I feel like the default now is a game that’s like “oh hey, go down this hallway full of locked doors! Except one door is unlocked, that’s a secret area, good for you! But otherwise go down the hallway to the next hallway!”

I used to send out my reminders by hand and made it very clear, pretty much what you wrote

I don’t know why you would emulate a script

Do you mean for their medical records? Like I would write their medical records into an encrypted file that they hold the key for?

This is an interesting idea but it would be reliant on the client self funding services. I also don’t know if it would be legal because I am not a lawyer and generally the government wants access to your data

The other aspect that I absolutely glossed over here which was probably a bad idea is that payers retain the right to your records for auditing purposes to ensure their funds are not being wasted (which is a whole textbook of issues).

The vast majority of time this transmits data that is typical for medical services and is somewhat minimal - time and date of service, CPT code(s) (aka what kind of service was rendered, diagnosis code(s) relevant to service, who the service was for, charge rate for the service (how much money I bill). The stuff you see on an explanation of benefits. Insurers don’t typically see actual progress notes.

However, they reserve the right to do so in a few instances: if you file a grievance against the clinician, if they feel the clinician is doing something wrong, or if they simply decide to do a random audit (this is astoundingly rare with commercial insurers but happens much more routinely with government funded plans like Medicare and Medicaid).

In the first instance it’s generally a good thing; the insurer is acting as an advocate for you because the clinician did you harm in some way. In this instance the insurer is actually one of the best people you can have on your team. They don’t actually care about you but they are aligned with your mission; if they can prove clinician malfeasance they can usually recoup tens of thousands of dollars of insurance payments going back years.

The second two are where things are muddier. When that insurance ceo got got a light was shone upon the ugliness of these systems for a brief moment but now no one cares again. Audits are increasingly being triggered by automation: if you are an outlier in terms of utilization then you run the risk of getting your therapist’s practice raided by Optum. Insurance regulations are contractual, not legal, and are often conflicting and obscenely complex. They are written in such a way that it is essentially guaranteed that if complex cases are audited they will find issue with dozens of notes. And the law is on the side of the insurance: they can go back years and rescind payments

So what can end up happening is that you come to therapy from a hospitalization. You aren’t doing well. You see me twice a week because of this for 4 months. You do better. We see each other for another 6 months weekly. You regress, and we go back to twice weekly for 4.5 months. You have optum insurance (a subsidiary of United, but they aren’t the only ones who do this), and their internal systems flag you for high utilization of services

They contact me and tell me that is anomalous and as a result they will be doing an audit of records. They don’t just audit you though, they audit anyone I work with who has optum for the last 3 years. Any note that has even a minor issue: did I not make use of an intervention clear enough? Did I forget to change the session times to actual times from the default 5-6pm? Did we have a session where you were doing poorly and it was more just me listening to you vent and process? All those are retroactively rejected. Now my practice suddenly owes optum thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands. I’ve had colleagues with group practices where this ends up being a 20-30k bill due in 15 days or their contract is voided and all their optum clients are fucked.

The problem is self funding services is a mixed bag. With overheads even as a telehealth only practice the minimum I can charge for a livable wage of about 50-60k a year is a sliding scale of $45-60 and frankly that only works because I have about 50% of a caseload that’s commercial insurance clients that pay double that. Even with that 45-60 is a huge ask for a weekly or biweekly service, 90-240 a month is a tremendous expense for most people. Therapy should cost nothing, or maybe like $10 a session at most, but if I charge that I will starve. I don’t know a resolution here.