That’s a strawman’s argument.

That’s not what a “strawman argument” is.

Medical school has to have a higher standard and any amount of cheating will get you expelled from most medical schools.

Having a “high standard” is very different from having a cut-throat advancement policy. And, as with any school policy, the investigation and prosecution of cheating varies heavily based on your social relations in the school. And when reports of cheating reach such high figures

A survey of 2,459 medical students found that 39% had witnessed cheating in their first 2 years of medical school, and 66.5% had heard about cheating. About 5% reported having cheated during that time.

then the problem is no longer with the individual but the educational system.

The exams will weed out the cheaters eventually

Nevermind the fact that his hasn’t born itself out. Medical Malpractice rates do not appear to shift based on the number of board exams issued over time. Hell, board exams are as rife with cheating as any other academic institution.

In the weed-out class example you gave, if there were 3 cheaters in the top half, that means students 51, 52, and 53 are wrongly denied the chance to progress.

If cheating produces a higher class rank, every student has an incentive to cheat. It isn’t an issue of being seat 51 versus 50, it’s an issue of competing with other cheating students, who could be anywhere in the basket of 100. This produces high rates of cheating that we see reported above.

B2B SaaS

I’ve been hearing some very serious accusations.

They still know your name, phone number, relationships, and every piece of info ever supplied to or from you in a text message going back as far as it is recorded on every phone which has ever downloaded the app.

Only because they bought the info off Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.

It’s a cruel and terrible world for those who aren’t ignorant.

At some point, being terminally anxious over the idea that a Chinese bureaucrat has access to a stack of high school yearbooks does nothing of benefit. There’s a long term material benefit to simply staying off social media (particularly the bigger instances) in a few rare but critical circumstances (getting a high security job, avoiding being hassled by the police). But for virtually everyone else, none of this shit matters.

an ordeal to overcome which causes growth

That’s the traditional argument for hazing rituals, sure. You’ll get an earful of this from drill sergeants and another earful from pray-the-gay-away conversion therapy camps.

But stack-ranking isn’t an ordeal to overcome. It is a bureaucratic sorting mechanism with a meritocratic veneer. If you put 100 people in a room and tell them “50 of you will fail”, there’s no ordeal involved. No matter how well the 51st candidate performs, they’re out. There’s no growth included in that math.

Similarly, larding people up with student debt before pushing them into the deep end of the career pool isn’t about improving one’s moral fiber. It is about extracting one’s future surplus income.

Vroom vroom vroom vroom vroom is my favorite single

a sufficiently tall and narrow burger ain’t a burger anymore

It’s a hotdog.

Broke: Intuitive responses may not be accurate and experimental experience is necessary to enjoy a fuller understanding of the world

Woke: People are idiots

Bespoke: Andrew Tate Voice

A 1995 experiment found that 50% of undergraduate males and 25% of females performed “very well” on the task and 20% of males and 35% of females performed “poorly”.

followed by a series of extremely misogynist noises

Schlotzky’s proved this out decades ago.

I might add that a lot of the college experience (particularly pre-med and early med school) is less about education than a kind of academic hazing. Students assigned enormous amounts of debt, crushing volumes of work, and put into pools of students beyond which only X% of the class can move forward on any terms (because the higher tier classes don’t have the academic staff / resources to train a full freshman class of aspiring doctors).

When you put a large group of people in a high stakes, high work, high competition environment, some number of people are going to be inclined to cut corners. Weeding out people who “cheat” seems premature if you haven’t addressed the large incentives to cheat, first.

Idk about you, but I would knock first.

The president in Idiocracy was generally reform minded and receptive to evidence-based argument and policy.

The court is already heavily tilted towards Trump, with at least three of them operating as a virtual rubber stamp to the President.

Meanwhile, the remaining judges don’t particularly like or support one another. Roberts and ACB seems happy enough to throw Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor under the bus.

What is a revolution if not a lot of small reforms happening all at once?

Broke: Car C is being a responsible, safety focused driver

Woke: Car C is holding up traffic for no good reason

Bespoke: Car Pink is whipping around that turn at 80 kmph and going to kill everyone anyone, so don’t sweet it.

What other means is there for primary accumulation if you’re not finding vacant land or taking occupied property?

Are you creating new real estate from nothing?

Friend’s FtM dad transitioned in his late 60s, after it became more socially acceptable. Before that, he was just a very masculine presenting lesbian. Now he’s a guy - a straight man in what is effectively a trans-het relationship.

popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less.

What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?

You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.

you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.

You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up after the “underpriced” properties, with some uncleared inventory unless demand exceeds supply.

But surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.

Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital.

They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program.

Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.