Par for the course for child agencies. Look up what Scotland is doing [a]. The old problem that all child agencies have: EVERY time it gets studied academically it turns out they do more damage than they ever help. This [1] is the biggest study ever on the subject.
Not only does the study prove that child well-being would improve (a LOT btw) if we just DOGE-style cancelled all child welfare interventions and ended the agencies entirely. It also proves how interventions should work: the more child protection agencies do, the worse the effect on the child. Every intervention is negative, but especially switching from voluntary care to involuntary destroys children's lives. But, of course, these agencies never do that. Anyone who knows the basics understands: social workers, when asked to leave, should leave and stay gone until asked to come back. This applies EVEN to children who are abused at home. Well, it applies if you want to help.
There's other studies. One particularly bad one shows that children who leave child services by committing a crime (because child services gets to choose ... and refuse any particular child. That means, effectively that if a child commits a violent crime, even if the kid is 10 years old, they get sent home). Those children who attacked their caregivers in child services with violence, had better outcomes than children who left foster/institutional care "normally". Better/more studies. Less crimes (yes, really), ...
Studies also prove that there are positives to be had in child agencies. But exactly in the way these agencies and the justice department hate. The people on the ground in those agencies are bad, as in having people "help" children, trainings, psychology, "support", ... has strong reinforcing negative effects. The more of those given, the stronger the negative effect on children. Even the highest level of support ever given (which is 4 hours weekly with a trained medical professional psychiatrist) had essentially no effect. Although at least trained doctor-psychologists can say that they did no damage. Social workers ... anything they do damages kids.
By contrast, concrete support WITHOUT forcing people onto kids works. Give a roof to parents who become homeless. Give children actual money for doing sports, for healthy food, medical help (even yes, the famous access to medical help without involving parents) ... without doing so much as checking what the money is used for (there is also a study that pointed out that even if they bought a PS1 with it that really helped). There is even a study of giving primary school children a single folder that explains (in over 40 pages) how and why to get to university. That had a big positive effect. A lot of things have positive effects. But "interventions", treatment by social workers or in general has strong, reinforcing, negative effects.
What you see time and again in studies is that people do not help. Psychologists (the non-medical-doctor kind), "nurses" (again the non-medical kind), school advisors, and social workers of every kind have almost universally negative effects on children, that worsen over time instead of improving things.
And it's not even close. VERY bad parents (even seriously abusive parents: e.g. single mom drug addict) are a lot better than the best places in child agencies.
The history of these studies go back far, and it has never really been different. And to that I'll add: treatment of children has improved a lot since WW2 (and the studies before WW2, let's just point out where certain things started [2] [3]). I have not found a single case since 1980 where a parent shot a child on purpose, worldwide, whereas in the 10 years after WW2 ... But you see this improvement across the board. Even extremely bad parents have improved a lot.
Oh and before you ask "what if parents abandon a child?". Well let me inform you: youth services DOES NOT take care of abandoned children. There's a medical service that does that, and until the child agency chooses to take in the child, they are taken care of in hospitals (since hospitals have to deal with long-term-ill children, most if not all countries have facilities to have children have extended stays in hospitals. Schools. Food. Sport activities ...). Of course, in every country I know of, child services agencies have decided that hospitals do not get any kind of compensation from the budget of child services for that. Hence I feel very comfortable saying that child welfare agencies do not, ever, take care of abandoned children.
Let's just say it like it is: in WW2, (Austrian) state child welfare agencies started the holocaust and enthousiastically participated in it (child welfare agencies in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, ... all enthousiastically participated. So frankly, even in WW2, a parent who shot their own children was still giving better care than the state)
If you're US based, there's tons of data broker sites, and you can glue together the information for free as various brokers leak various bits (E.g. Some leak the address, others leak emails, others leak phone numbers). And that's by design for SEO reasons, they want you to be able to google someone with the information you have, so they can sell you the information you don't have.
Some straight up list it all, and instead of selling people's information to other people, they sell removals to the informations owner. Presumably this is a loop hole to whatever legislation made most sites have a "Do Not Sell My Info" opt out.
What you do is look up a data broker opt out guide, and that gives you a handy list of data brokers to search. E.g.
Apple already has a kind of "backdoor": they store the keys for encrypted cloud backups in their cloud as well. They advertise that cloud data are encrypted but prefer not to mention that they also have a key to decrypt it. Even with the highest level of security [1] your contacts list in Apple Cloud are not encrypted. Why? Probably someone asked for this.
The app store is not secure or trusted. They've shipped malware. App store reviewers have not launched one of my apps in the last... _34 releases_. Their last open was >6 mo ago. They review my releases, some with 100k LoC diffs, in <30m.
Their reviewer account was actually broken once for 4 months, and we always passed review anyways. Yes, I can tell if they used another account because once shipped Apple review is the _only_ group on the planet with that build # prior to release. They could launch the app without network but it wouldn't do anything since the the very first thing is to either refresh auth or login.
The App Store is a scam that I pay > $3M/year to Apple in fees for.
> "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm," he said. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."
> In a 2019 article, Jerry Useem criticized Boeing's move to Chicago, suggesting that by "isolating" the Boeing management from its engineering and manufacturing staff, the company discounted its former engineering-led corporate culture in favor of a management style run by MBAs instead of engineers.[7]
> When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable.
She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.
That reminds me of this old bit of Internet humor, called "The Parable of the Toaster"[0]:
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an Electrical Engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The advisor: "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, an IT consultant, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelette classes."
"The ham and cheese omelette class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 48MB of memory, a 1.2GB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap."
The king wisely had the IT consultant beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
> The US freight rail network is in excellent shape.
The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].
Something not said explicitly but to me, is the characteristic sound of psy-x is the synth bass line. It's a very simple sound that you can make in any subtractive synth - you start with a single saw, add a lowpass filter, and instead of using the amplitude envelope to control the dynamics or "pluck" of the sound you modulate the cutoff of the filter by an envelope with a very short attack, quick decay, and low or zero sustain.
If you're fancy you can use a stepper or lfo sync'd to 16th notes to do the same thing instead of programming loops of 16th notes.
And of course, you sidechain compress that with the kick to get the pumping sound.
That's how you get the deep vibe of a psy track that resonates in the club at 2am.
That's just the basics. The really good tracks find ways to make it crazy, like modulating the decay of the filter envelope with velocity of the notes and then adding velocity curves to create dynamics with the baseline, or adding a reverb send and automating the send level as you build up to the end of a phrase. Or taking the basic idea (a plucky bass with sixteenth notes) and changing how the pluck is defined via an FM synth, or overdrive, or frequency shift, and so on. It's such a simple sound that can be driven to weird places.
Not only does the study prove that child well-being would improve (a LOT btw) if we just DOGE-style cancelled all child welfare interventions and ended the agencies entirely. It also proves how interventions should work: the more child protection agencies do, the worse the effect on the child. Every intervention is negative, but especially switching from voluntary care to involuntary destroys children's lives. But, of course, these agencies never do that. Anyone who knows the basics understands: social workers, when asked to leave, should leave and stay gone until asked to come back. This applies EVEN to children who are abused at home. Well, it applies if you want to help.
There's other studies. One particularly bad one shows that children who leave child services by committing a crime (because child services gets to choose ... and refuse any particular child. That means, effectively that if a child commits a violent crime, even if the kid is 10 years old, they get sent home). Those children who attacked their caregivers in child services with violence, had better outcomes than children who left foster/institutional care "normally". Better/more studies. Less crimes (yes, really), ...
Studies also prove that there are positives to be had in child agencies. But exactly in the way these agencies and the justice department hate. The people on the ground in those agencies are bad, as in having people "help" children, trainings, psychology, "support", ... has strong reinforcing negative effects. The more of those given, the stronger the negative effect on children. Even the highest level of support ever given (which is 4 hours weekly with a trained medical professional psychiatrist) had essentially no effect. Although at least trained doctor-psychologists can say that they did no damage. Social workers ... anything they do damages kids.
By contrast, concrete support WITHOUT forcing people onto kids works. Give a roof to parents who become homeless. Give children actual money for doing sports, for healthy food, medical help (even yes, the famous access to medical help without involving parents) ... without doing so much as checking what the money is used for (there is also a study that pointed out that even if they bought a PS1 with it that really helped). There is even a study of giving primary school children a single folder that explains (in over 40 pages) how and why to get to university. That had a big positive effect. A lot of things have positive effects. But "interventions", treatment by social workers or in general has strong, reinforcing, negative effects.
What you see time and again in studies is that people do not help. Psychologists (the non-medical-doctor kind), "nurses" (again the non-medical kind), school advisors, and social workers of every kind have almost universally negative effects on children, that worsen over time instead of improving things.
And it's not even close. VERY bad parents (even seriously abusive parents: e.g. single mom drug addict) are a lot better than the best places in child agencies.
The history of these studies go back far, and it has never really been different. And to that I'll add: treatment of children has improved a lot since WW2 (and the studies before WW2, let's just point out where certain things started [2] [3]). I have not found a single case since 1980 where a parent shot a child on purpose, worldwide, whereas in the 10 years after WW2 ... But you see this improvement across the board. Even extremely bad parents have improved a lot.
Oh and before you ask "what if parents abandon a child?". Well let me inform you: youth services DOES NOT take care of abandoned children. There's a medical service that does that, and until the child agency chooses to take in the child, they are taken care of in hospitals (since hospitals have to deal with long-term-ill children, most if not all countries have facilities to have children have extended stays in hospitals. Schools. Food. Sport activities ...). Of course, in every country I know of, child services agencies have decided that hospitals do not get any kind of compensation from the budget of child services for that. Hence I feel very comfortable saying that child welfare agencies do not, ever, take care of abandoned children.
[a] https://www.gov.scot/policies/girfec/named-person/
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDoc...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1 (note the URL)
[3] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia... ("the buses", these were child welfare agencies) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_Spiegelgrund
Let's just say it like it is: in WW2, (Austrian) state child welfare agencies started the holocaust and enthousiastically participated in it (child welfare agencies in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, ... all enthousiastically participated. So frankly, even in WW2, a parent who shot their own children was still giving better care than the state)