I was homeschooled and have severe social anxiety and no social skills, whereas two of my siblings having exceptional social/people skills. It’s not black and white, and the bad outcomes aren’t inevitable, but I myself would never encourage anyone to do homeschooling.

My own parents’ motives and abilities were not aligned with good educational outcomes.

I was homeschooled by such parents as you describe, and I still have social difficulties in my 30’s because of it. I also wasn’t hugged at all, but I don’t think that alone would have fixed it 😛

I was homeschooled in the US and no such testing was required, and it still is not required in my state. I think it absolutely should be required if homeschooling is going to continue to be allowed.

I was “homeschooled”, along with my many siblings, by Southern Baptist parents. I couldn’t really read until I was 9, and my younger siblings until even later. My older siblings had it marginally better, but not by much.

I was horrendously under-socialiazed, and I still struggle with debilitating social anxiety to this day. Although I should emphasize that a couple of my siblings are very socially competent and relatively well-adjusted, so I’m not sure how much of my issues in that domain are nature vs. nurture.

It always made me feel awful and dumb to hear peers at church talking about school-related things and what subjects they were learning, because I had no idea what they were talking about, which exacerbated my social difficulties. In my teenage years I started to understand what was happening, and I practically had to beg my mother for any kind of instructional material. I taught myself algebra with the help of internet friends. I still distinctly recall how utterly unscientific and creationist-bent was a biology textbook I got; it was so bad that even I was questioning it at the time.

My younger siblings were eventually allowed to participate in a homeschooling “coop” after my younger brother begged for something. Homeschool coops involve homeschool families getting together to have some semi-structured classes, usually something like once a week. Said brother took a “psychology” class there, the textbook for which was written by a guy with a business or economics degree and no background in psychology, and it said mental illness was the result of sin.

Home schooling in my state is ridiculously under-regulated. All you have to do is be registered with a private school as homeschooling and submit transcripts that comply with the state education requirements. That’s literally it. My mother fabricated them - the records say I took Spanish in high school, but I couldn’t have told you much beyond “hola”.

I went to college with what was essentially a fake high school diploma. I languished in my 20’s. I got a master’s degree in my 30’s, but I was lucky and happened to be gifted when it came to academia; most homeschool kids aren’t so fortunate. Most of my siblings have not managed to actualize their potential. I myself could have been doing much more much earlier if I hadn’t gotten a woman pregnant during college because I’d never had anyone tell me to use a condom. In retrospect, my parents’ duress at learning that I was having a child out of wedlock is almost comical for having been essentially self-induced.

I don’t know if homeschooling should be banned outright (as I’m aware of select cases where some parents weren’t neglectful and it was actually a better option for some kids due to various circumstances), but something needs to change. At a minimum, I think homeschoolers should be required to do the same state standardized testing as required in public schools in order to ensure they’re not being outright neglected like I and my siblings were.

My child is attending public school, which has had it’s own set of issues (bullying and a shocking amount of violence, for starters), but it’s a marvel to me the gap between what she knows and what I knew at her age. She’s learning things that I still haven’t. She’s better off for it.

Tl;Dr: don’t homeschool, do improve public school.

Right, do we not remember PRISM? Edward Snowden is still living in exile in Russia.

They don’t need to tap your router when they already tap the routes.

Right, like, who did you think you were making surveillance tools for? Because it wasn’t Mr. Rogers.

Also, sometimes people can catch something without being aware of it.

Not just sometimes, a lot of the time. STD’s are often asymptomatic, especially in men. The majority of HPV infections have no symptoms, but they can cause cervical and other cancers (and warts!). Even with HIV, an estimated 13% of people who have it don’t know they have it (per hiv.gov).

Not just suicide assistance chat bots, but suicide promotion chat bots.

Why would you not both be able to take both names? Is there some archaic, patriarchal law getting in the way?

Dickbaskets have an annoying habit of getting into positions of power.

Haiku. It’s a reimplementation of BeOS.

Alternatively, you could use ReactOS and make it look as windows-like as possible, and then go and post on Windows support forums with solutions to problems that work for ReactOS but not for actual Windows, and then play dumb while calling them dumb when it doesn’t work for them.

I use arch btw.

Hitler was worse so far. I do believe the only thing that might prevent Trump from becoming as bad on a numbers basis is his deteriorating health. I’m not entirely confident that someone won’t be able to pick up wherever he leaves off, though.

I can’t speak for other professions, and it might help that there’s more demand than supply for nurses in most places, but nobody in hiring has ever seemed to care what school I went to. I went to a small private school, and I passed the same certification exam and have the same professional license as anyone who went to an ivy league school or a state school. 🤷

It would also have to cause terror. The people using these websites live in such an abject state of terror about their own inferiority that this probably had no measurable effect anyway.

I never understood how anyone thought touch screens were going to take over for productivity. Back when they were being hyped, it seemed plainly obvious to me that even multitouch didplays couldn’t outpace a physical keyboard and mouse for input speed.

I can’t find it with a cursory search, but I remember seeing marketing back then for a laptop that was just two touch screens with no touchpad/keyboard. Color me shocked that it didn’t become the new norm…

I remember when Doom Ultra HD 8k came on 40k floppies. Back before we even had 2k displays. It took nearly 2 days to read it all into RAM (mind you, I had a cluster of 200 computers just to have enough ram…) and ran at about 0.01 FPS on my 640x480 CRT. And you had to read about 73 more floppies every time you loaded a new map.

Ah, the good old days.

Eh, I have worked in 2 psychiatric hospitals in the USA. Neither have interior pictures posted online - it’s not that they’re trying to hide anything, it’s probably just that it never occurred to anyone with authority that making photos available could be helpful/useful. The only time I’ve seen interior photos online is the websites of private/for-profit places that wanted to show off how nice their facility is in order to attract customers.

That said, whether CAPS has something to hide is a question beyond me.

Don’t apologize for being yourself.

(Unless you’re a narcissist. Then you probably should apologize.)

For me, it depends how those hours are grouped. I currently work five 8-hour days and hate it. I miss working three 12’s. I only work a few more hours per week doing 8’s than I did with 12’s, but I have two thirds more commute time, and never have a weekday off, so it feels like I work almost twice as much. And it’s a pain trying to schedule appointments for anything, since I work the same hours as doctors, banks, etc.

Neither of those are examples of government databases though? The first was a (disturbingly, comedically) poorly secured private database, and the second an instance of a single individual being targeted and their records accessed illegally…

Certainly, data breaches happen, but I’m not sure what your point is specifically.