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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • This is just guidance from the Iowa DoE. This has been a law for a year now, but the DoE wouldn’t put out official guidance on it, making school districts scramble to figure things out on their own.

    If a student even asks a hypothetical “if I were to ask to be called by…”, parents have to be notified. Generic notice was given to our GSA that students that were unsure if their parents were supportive should ask to be called by their last names to avoid being deadnamed.

    As a teacher, every student became a “they”, all my seating charts were done by last name, and I had to refuse calling students nicknames unless it was noted in our official system. As a trans teacher, I was targeted by a parent who tried to set me up. A student asked to be called by a shortened name where it was unclear if it was a different gender from their given name (think like Chris for Christina). They did not ask any other teacher to do this, and their parents refused to sign anything allowing it. So I refused, and parents tried to escalate it. Fortunately my admin is amazing and just removed the student from my class.

    Side note: the same year they did this, they also passed a law that mandated that the student mental health survey that the CDC puts out every year be replaced by their own Iowa version. The only difference? They removed questions about sexual orientation and gender identity questions. These questions include things like “how often have you had thoughts of killing yourself” and “how often do you feel down or depressed”. We know, statistically, that these laws will increase suicidality among queer students, but now we don’t have any way to prove that the laws they passed had that effect. It’s downright evil.





  • Publicly traded companies are, by law, driven to make as much money as possible for shareholders. Privately held companies are not held to this same limitation. So while a company like Valve could be highly profit-driven (let’s be honest, all for-profit companies in a capitalist system are driven by this motivation), it doesn’t seem to be driven to maximize profits in the short term. This means that they can focus on things other than profit if they so choose.











  • It depends on the chipset. The big changes in chipset have been the big barriers for Mac upgradability. My father ran a 10 year old MacBook that was still running the latest MacOS until he found that his 4GB of RAM wasn’t going to be enough and bought a new one (without talking to me first). I had a PPC MacBook that ran on the latest MacOS for about 6 years after Apple switched to Intel.



  • Just to be clear, they follow 1 random Jewish student who says they “felt threatened” because they saw a swastika “on or around campus”. They then talk to another student who is the leader of a pro-Israel student group. They don’t talk to any of the people actually at the encampments. They don’t talk to any pro-Palestinian students. They take these 2 Jewish students word at face value. There’s no studies cited, and no other evidence offered.

    This story is part of a larger media narrative to paint anything that is supporting Palestine or is critical of Israel as antisemitism. It accepts pro-Israel talking points as fact with little or no actual investigation into whether anything said is actually true.