Pete Hahnloser

Green energy/tech reporter, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

  • 56 Posts
  • 252 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I had to find my own way. That’s of value.

    If you had a supportive set of teachers, telling you that you can do anything, where’s the challenge? I went back to my high school and dutifully waited for the department chair with a rehearsed, belittling speech. When Columbia says you’re the best editorial writer in the country at the college level from literally the first one I wrote, teachers tend to not only back the fuck off but also to do this weird thing where they revise history and talk about the promise they saw in me.

    I succeeded despite what I was told. It’s possible that I was more inclined to fucking do it right. When I was doing the Aaron Sorkin thing and moving through the newsroom and telling my reporters that their girlfriends are irrelevant on election night, and indeed told one to get the fuck out, I saw the power of my role. This was 24 years ago, and we didn’t have the phones we have today.

    There are a lot of people who care deeply about others. Many of us go into journalism. We don’t want anyone else to go through what we have. It’s difficult, but one win is all one needs to feel like maybe we saved the next generation.


  • First off, 10 is an integer square root. Of 100.

    I get where you’re coming from on most points and agree overall. However, you’re not taking into consideration what secondary schooling looks like before students arrive.

    I was told by multiple English teachers (including the head of the department) that I was a math student and should never attempt to write because I saw through the regurgitation assignments, didn’t agree with teacher assessments of what Dickens “was trying to do” and had zero interest in confirming their biases.

    I also didn’t pursue page design and getting onto my high school paper because the only F I got there was from the advisor who was exceptionally clear that I was not welcome to attempt committing journalism after mocking up yearbook pages and being very unhappy with the results in Aldus PageMaker; there was no support system in place. (Also, our yearbook was shit on every level.)

    That said, I can still write a ternary line of code where it makes sense sted an if-else block.

    College coursework on the whole is a waste of time reinventing wheels. I don’t need to spend a couple of weeks working up to “Hello, world!” in C and as such left CS as a major my first quarter at uni.

    For the most part, I’ve been very lucky with teachers and professors. When I started taking college classes in high school and escaped the absurdity of recitation being “thinking for myself,” I learned to love writing because my prof, a Catholic deacon, wanted thesis defense, not what he’d said in lecture. If I was 180 off of his viewpoint but could cite sources, that was an A.

    But teachers do this shit every day, year after year, and we blindly say they’re doing important work even as they discourage people from finding their path and voice, because god forbid a 16-year-old challenges someone in their 50s.


















  • I left Facebook in 2014, having had to rejoin because in that era, you had to have an account to get a job. Which is another topic but worth keeping in mind.

    If I don’t know why I’m somewhere, I leave. Rave, website, bar … these are all the same questions, just with less external pressure because you aren’t the product in the other two situations.