romaaeterna

I strongly suspect that the invite-only version is the tech that was described in the demo, and differs from the $250K version by the size of the air tank and compression motor.

Without fuel or an oxidizer or combustion? Not really. It's compressed air, like an air rifle.

Amazing tech demo. I would have liked to see more discussion of the cold-gas thrusters in the earlier Hacker News article. Some people seemed confused and made claims that the demo was a separate "rocket" version that used a combustion technology.

You remain confused.

That's real. Asians show a massive (compared to anything else that moved) NAEP score increase over the 25-year period, which is presumably tied to changing English-language competency as a group. It matters less for the overall average score as their population share is much smaller.

If you want more data on something or other, you should state the hypothesis that you are trying to test. Mine is pretty simple and was easy to test like I did in the first post: in a world of mostly static in-group NAEP 8th-grade reading scores (like the one we live in) large shifts in population shares (like we see) dominate the overall average.

Pew Research Center says that over this period, 2000 to 2024, 78% (2000) to 68% (2024) of Hispanics spoke Spanish at home. To me, that sounds more than sufficient to explain a 20pt NAEP 8th-grade reading gap.

I learned my statistics in university, not Youtube. You are confusing yourself about residuals.

To make my point in the original post, I held the group scores fixed and extrapolated combined scores based on changing population sizes. This is straightforward. Simple even.

\(\widehat S=\sum_g p_gS_g,\)

Why did I call this "linear"? (Not a "linear model", your term, because it is not). The model function actually tracks the population function. Over the 25-year period, however, this trend is in fact linear because the White-to-Hispanic population trend is linear on that timescale. Over a longer timescale it would not be.

If you graph actual NAEP since 1998 versus a 1998 group-fixed score, you'll see increases (1998-2002, 2005-2013, 2015-2017) and multiple declines twice taking the line back down to the 1998 linear trend prediction (2002-2005, 2017-2024).

It is wrong to get overly exact here though. We are talking about a overall score variance of just 10pts in the face of an achievement gap of nearly 30pts, with an absolutely massive 20% decline in white population share over the 26 year period.

There is a particular set of political views associated with people who read classical languages? I fail to see what you are calling "rational" here.

Where did you come up with "Mexicans" or "intelligence"?

Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?

I don't assume that. See the first table, even better in shagie's nicely reformatted version.

You are the person in this discussion invoking race genetics. Why does your mind go there?

Coincidence? Of course not.

1998? I wanted a quarter century of Grade 8 and that gives me 1998 to 2024 with NAEP. 2000 reading assessment was Grade 4 only. You can do it with any pair of years.

If you take the 1998 NAEP 8th grade reading scores by race, re-weight them by the new 2024 demographic makeup of American 8th graders, you will find a predicted point decline of 4.6, rather close to the actual 4 point fall over the period.

Over the same period, reading scores actually improved somewhat for each of the 1998 poorly scoring groups (and quite a bit for Asians), but the poorly scoring groups simply make up so much more of the population now that it drags everything else down.

| Group | 1998 NAEP | 2024 NAEP | Change |

|---|---:|---:|---:|

| White | *268* | *266* | −2 |

| Black | *242* | *243* | +1 |

| Hispanic | *241* | *245* | +4 |

| Asian/Pacific Islander | *261* | *280* | +19 |

| All public-school students | *261* | *257* | −4 |

| Race/ethnicity | 1999 Grade 8 | 2023 Grade 8 | Change |

|---|---:|---:|---:|

| White | *64.5%* | *44.0%* | −20.5 pp |

| Black | 16.1% | 14.9% | −1.2 pp |

| Hispanic | *14.3%* | *29.4%* | +15.1 pp |

| Asian/Pacific Islander* | 3.9% | 5.9% | +2.0 pp |

| American Indian/Alaska Native | 1.2% | 0.9% | −0.3 pp |

| Two or more races | not separately reported | 4.8% | — |

In September the Russians accused the Ukrainians of having repairing downed Geran drone airframes at the Lviv LORTA plant, transferring them to Yavoriv, and launching them unarmed into Poland. They presented various evidence like serial numbers, photographs of silver-tape repairs, claims that a Ukrainian SIM-card was used, lack of impact destruction, etc.

What's true though? I don't believe that I have a way to find out.

There's no real solution other than long-term tariffs. However the President doesn't have the power to do it and Congress doesn't have the willpower. 6-month flash-in-the-pan efforts can only cause chaos.