I agree with your point. I'll just add that in my country, at least, the facade of democracy seemed to provide society with infectious glimmers of hope. The hope is fading quickly, and the general mood is both sour and bitter, straining interpersonal relationships.
Anyway, I'm not sure how democracy can really work in huge super-complex societies. This is why we have the "iron law of oligarchy".
Democracy in the sense of representative majoritarianism cannot work as the representatives will be bought, coerced, or murdered. In an absolute democracy, when the majority cease to be useful the powerful will launch propaganda campaigns and/or manipulate the vote outcome.
If time permits, this is a good era to learn guitar if you haven't already. Or some sort of creative brain or muscle hobby where screens aren't the central focus.
I never cared for the "learning how to learn" line. We start from infancy and learn to walk and talk, albeit in that very special way. We are always learning, every day.
For me personally, earning by bachelor's and master's degree was a continuation of K-12 and I made sure to be a top performer. The looming debt was the underlying, motivating factor.
Looking back, I learned most outside after K-12 was done for the day and I was free to explore and get hurt.
That phrase is a thing because K-12 is structured as just learning what the teacher tells you. In undergraduate degrees, the professors are more like guideposts and you can't learn everything in their lectures - you have to figure out and understand the material yourself and most people upon finishing K-12 can't do that.
I also wasn't one of them, so I also had no trouble in college, but I knew a lot of people this applied to.
Those around me just write a lot more slowly, writing in print (they don’t connect the letters like in cursive, they can’t easily read my very-clean cursive either, which gives a feeling that my cursive is a sort of superpower)
I learned cursive in 2nd grade and was very strictly REQUIRED to use it up until high school, where they stopped requiring cursive.
1) My cursive was always slower than print. I was happy to go back to print so I could write fast. I went to school in the "analog" era, so 100% of all assignments were hand written and not typed.
2) I noticed that literally only 1 person in my school stayed with cursive when printing was an option. It was so unusual it stuck out.
3) I only know one person who writes cursive now in every day life even though 100% of us learned it in school.
4) That person is my dad and he writes in the style of these documents. If you gave me one of these documents and told me my dad wrote it, id believe you.
Which makes me think we all somehow were taught cursive wrong or practiced it wrong. My cursive was never fast and never looked like these documents.
Anyway, I found this, which summed up my feelings learning cursive perfectly
>Reading and literacy expert Randall Wallace, of Missouri State University, says “it seems odd and perhaps distracting that early readers, just getting used to decoding manuscript, would be asked to learn another writing style.”
I found it so frustrating that I just learned how to write one way and then they tell me that's not the "proper" way to write and we need to learn this other way to write.
Very interesting.. Frankly did not know most of what's said in replies.. That it's not compulsorily taught and more surprisingly it's slower to write!
I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower? Anyway I need to try to really know I guess! Versus the time taken to add those extra links.
Like most others I've not written much in years perhaps decades, that has screwed up my handwriting as even minor notes are these days illegible even to me after a few days
Thanks for the replies.. Cleared a few misconceptions... One of them being writing in blocks is somewhat 'childish' and cursive is more literate.
Added later: read parts of the long article it's very interesting.. Need to read it fully.
>I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower?
The extra strokes required for all those fucking loops more than make up for having to pick up the pen.
Cursive probably made a lot of sense when people were writing with quill pens, but in modern times each individual has their own comfort level and preferences.
>Cleared a few misconceptions... One of them being writing in blocks is somewhat 'childish' and cursive is more literate.
I was taught exactly that when I was growing up, which is why cursive was required for all school assignments pre high school. I always thought it was bullshit though because books aren't written in cursive and I only knew a single adult that used cursive in their every day lives. It seemed like a weird academic script.
I think a big reason I was so frustrated with being forced to use cursive in school was because after I learned to write in print and before I learned cursive I wrote a LOT. Like I'd write stories almost every day. I loved writing so much and then they gave me this new script that I needed to use for writing that slowed me down. It's like... Stop changing things on me.
I'm really glad cursive is no longer required in a lot of places. My school years would have been so much better without being forced to use cursive.
I'm not sure if it's related to how kids are taught to hold the pen. And the pen itself. In India as a kid, that was really long back, ball pens banned, you had to use fountain pens. And I hold the pen like it's featured in most pen ads.
When I spent time in East, like Singapore, Malaysia I was shocked to see people holding pens like they're about to stab the paper. Even kids. But I did learn they also had fountain pens only rule for a long while before relaxing.
So often I watch/read various excavations with resulting museum/institutional acquisitions and I think to myself, “things may have been undiscovered, but now that they’re discovered these artifacts are on borrowed time, long-long term.”
The artifacts weren't in a stasis field when they were buried in the ground: they were decaying there too. Whether that was faster or slower than after being excavated and stored in a museum depends on the artifact's composition and the properties of the place it was stored. I guess in a museum, however, they're somewhat more susceptible to damage or theft since now people know about them, or they could be damaged or destroyed in a war.
I get the same feeling; every time a museum or archive expands its collection, it's taking on a long-term responsibility for those objects.
Put your discovered objects in a warehouse, now their survival is conditional on the continued funding of whatever institution owns the building. If the items are in fancy climate-controlled storage units, who will maintain the air conditioning and pay the electricity bill for the next ten, fifty, or a hundred years?
I'm sure people who work at archives have to think about these questions on time-scales much longer than those offered by grants or rounds of charity fundraising.
That particular illustration is an artistic interpretation of another older illustration. I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun.
There’s a YouTube video somewhere that explains all of this and shows a more accurate physical model (or as accurate as can be reasonably expected) that is located somewhere in Bologna, which suggests that there were quite a few towers but not that many and not that tall as shown here. In any case it still had an impressive skyline for its day.
If I remember to do so, I’ll come back here and post a link.
>> I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun.
Isn't that really weird? I realise that most people experience the internet only through their phone browser and social media apps, where it's hard to do many of the common and simple things one can do on a computer, like pasting a link. How is it that those extremely fiddly interfaces have come to be the norm?
Because they're with us everywhere and conveniently at hand most of the time. A traditional computer, even in laptop form, is comparatively bulky, unwieldy and inconvenient. Laptops don't fit into your pocket, they don't pull out for one handed use while you're waiting in line and they don't slip easily back in once the line starts moving again. To type in text, you need both hands free, and a relatively stable surface to place your laptop on.
Phones trade ease of use for ease of access. They allow people to be online and participating in an online discussion when and where a traditional computer would be prohibitive or inconvenient. And as a trade off those people aren't always able to do (or conveniently do) something they would do on those traditional computers. Most people most of the time seem to find that an acceptable tradeoff. And to be fair to those most people, I write far more than I copy and paste links so it's not unreasonable to find that tradeoff to be acceptable.
Most people never need to manually copypaste links on a mobile device because they can share links, via the browser’s share button, straight to all the apps relevant to them. Use cases like sharing URLs on a legacy non-mobile-oriented web platform such as HN are an extreme outlier. In any case, copying a URL via the browser’s "Share->Copy" or equivalent isn’t IMO too onerous a task even compared to C-l C-c.
I see one right now near the bottom limb (observing from North America). It's been slowly moving to right the last few days as the sun rotates. I'm using cheap eclipse glasses.
The Times, at least a few years back, had a quite frequent habit of using phrases such as "sources say" or "according to sources" or "people familiar with the matter." It wasn't always like that.
Some of that is fine as people sometimes would like to remain anonymous and have the trust of the publication, journalist, and readers. Sure, many touchy stories are important and people can give quotes on background. But that can't become a consistent habit without, at some point, providing better attribution when a string of stories bear some relation.
I've cut back on the Times for the most part due to my issues with "sources say," but maybe they've improved.
