Combine with a drop in IQ as CO2 levels increase. This is very bad.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Is that not why schools in many places take a break over the summer?
No, it's so the children could help at the farm during the busiest time.
Wouldn't the busiest time be harvest time. Which would be Sept or October usually.
That’s a bit of a myth:
The history of summer holidays is clouded with myths. One popular idea is that school children have a long summer holiday (six weeks for most pupils in the UK) so that they could help work in the fields over the summer. But the current school system was developed over the course of the 19th century, when English farms were increasingly mechanised and having children helping with the harvest would only have been necessary for a small percentage of the population. Besides which, a brief glance at the farming calendar tells you that a holiday that ends at the start of September is not going to be much use for bringing in the harvest in the early autumn. So whatever the origin of six weeks off at the height of summer is, it’s not for the sake of farmers.
We should also distinguish between two types of historical explanation: people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, but they tend to keep doing the things that create good results. However, they may not know what’s causing those results, and it may have nothing to do with why they initially decided to engage in that behavior. So you can have people all over converge on a certain behavior without a consistent explanation for why they’re doing it—and popular explanations (even if historically informed) may have nothing to do with why the behavior actually persists.
I was thinking of the US system.
Also, people tend to keep doing things because that's how they do things, not because it's inherently the best thing to do. Consider natural selection: organisms have all sorts of weird and useless features that are there because they don't critically hinder their ability to reproduce; it's all just good enough to not get outcompeted. To draw a parallel, some societies have summer breaks because they had summer breaks, and there's no external force requiring a change.
Sure—but notice that the US, UK, and many other places converged on the same behavior—which in most cases arose as a consensus among local schools that hit on similar practices without any central coordination. Which suggests that the behavior is more than a historical accident.
It's easier to copy someone else's system than to optimize a new one yourself.
And since America is the greatest country on earth they came up with it right?
Huh, I wonder if I could've used that explanation back in my school days for some of my low grades. I don't think temperatures went over 33ºC, but 30º is a norm to this day (Brazilian midwest), but the majority of classrooms had nothing to help air circulate.
And humanity stupidifies more and more...
Yeah it’s the humidity. I lived in the American Southwest for a long time where temperatures could reach 125°F. I had no trouble mentally. But one week in A Florida summer and I could barely function.
Can confirm. I live here and I don’t go outside during the summer because it fucking sucks, and everyone is an idiot. Humidity makes people do stupid shit.
I put 2 stroke oil in my 4 stroke lawnmower the other day. It was stupid hot out. Temps dropped at least 20 degrees the next day. I didn't feel stupid I was stupid.