PolarKraken

Haha hell yeah, enjoy!

AC6 was so great, I went directly from NG -> NG+ -> NG++, which I never do. Never wanted it to end.

Eh? C'mon you gotta elaborate on that!

Voting against, succinctly:

• "opt out" implies unearned trust, from the jump
• mechanically, no data is less or more available, with sufficient motivation
• preferring the illusion of privacy is a self-defeating pattern of behavior, it has run amok
• I'm generally against concentration of info access, on principle

I think there are good reasons to disagree, but I won't make that case as well as someone who does, so I'll leave it to others.

where all the tubes and knobs rise out of it and retract back in

what the fuck

Couldn't agree more. Parenting failures are the root of so much (though being charitable, there are many parents in working conditions that basically destroy their ability to parent effectively). Regardless of parents, any kid is shaped (raised) in big ways by the communities they participate in. I've got no problem telling a little knucklehead - even one I've never met - to quit mistreating folks in various ways when I see it. And I wish more people would too.

But I also recognize that has the potential to really blow up (even violently) depending on the kid's parents and the scenario. But still, many of us just recoil from even the idea of a disagreement, and that's the mechanism that allows this stuff to fester in our youth. Take responsibility for your society, be mean to a kid who needs it today!

Ah, but yet...

"Wagenius"? The dumbest dude in the article has a surname that is the "Wario" or "Waluigi"-ified version of the word genius. That is rich.

Woof, that's hilarious and annoying. Food service from what I understand has super thin margins - things like fountain drink sodas (and alcohol sales at other spots) do a lot of the work on keeping the place economically viable. Not excusing that guy's pettiness but if you see weird behavior around a specific ingredient or item, it's probably something along those lines.

The bummer is that like most things sensory, our perception of how sweet it is depends massively on how sweet everything else we eat is. So for folks in the US who just grow up eating all of these over sweetened products it seems normal and less sweet products taste bland in a way most consumers can't easily identify.

As for how we got here, this is how it seems to me:

Food marketers learned that if you take two identical food products, and add a small amount of sugar to one, most consumers will prefer the sweeter one even if they don't identify it as "I like this one cuz it's a little sweeter". Our brains are just super primed to subconsciously reach for calorie dense foods, and sweetness says "there's energy here".

Think of a basic item like bread or tomato sauce - no sugar initially, they aren't sweets after all. Imagine some brands take that tactic and add a little sugar - the others who don't slowly lose market share until they either fade to irrelevance or add sugar too - well, now that's the new perceived normal. Later, to stand out, someone bumps it again. Consumers start preferring that new slightly sweeter product - rinse and repeat for a few decades across basically all of our food products (plus guzzling soda, another topic), and eventually you have a country full of outrageously sugary foods that taste "normal" to most folks.

It's sad and it's actually really challenging to reset one's palate. I've done it, for like 30+ days, ate only things that had zero added sweeteners of any kind, artificial or otherwise. It's expensive and time-consuming here but before long, even certain raw veggies like carrots start to taste unmistakably sweet. Corn on the cob becomes almost a dessert. And then, now habituated to a much more normal level of sweetness, processed foods taste like the poison they are. But to do that consistently here in the US and keep that normal degree of sensitivity, it requires a dogmatic level of dedication, never going out to eat at all, etc.

So like most things, the population here got manipulated in subtle ways into slowly changing their preferences, without any real coordination or intent by the manipulators beyond "doing a little bit of this bad thing outperforms our competition", and rinse and repeat until we're all deranged and don't even realize it.

I think it's probably being in the age range that kinda straddled the time between now - when it's all an unshakeable piece of daily life - and the time before it existed / was commonplace. Having grown up before all of these world changing tech advances, and then being there for the ride, is just a singular experience and perspective neither our parents or our kids can possibly have.

I'm really grateful for having gotten to take the ride, but it does strike me as sad in a way.

I'm advocating for a mixed approach that serves more kids, and arguing that you had such a mixed approach yourself but don't seem to acknowledge it.

Memorization (done properly, that is - I invoked "spaced repetition", an evidence-based learning technique from the field of education, you're the one talking about corporal punishment from nuns) is effective in precisely this and related domains having tons of minutiae.

It's not that learning the process is inefficient, that's not what I meant - learning only the process and not focusing on rote memorization as well leaves you with only the process to rely on when learning further math (your experience sounds like you got both, regarding multiplication).

Relying on only rules/processes to complete intermediate steps that are not the subject under instruction is what is inefficient. Using rules to reach simple multiplication facts when trying to learn algebra or even just long division is brutal for kids with any attention difficulty whatsoever. By the time they've solved the multiplication answer they wanted, they've lost the thread on the new concept. Rote memorization reduces the effort needed to use multiplication when learning everything else. It doesn't feel that you're reading very carefully here, but it could be me who failed to make myself plain.

I myself am a process guy and high on pattern-seeking. I write software for a living and live in abstractions layered on abstractions - even the physics is invisible lol, nothing (but fans and I guess HDD heads where still used) ever moves. It all feels like pretend!

My point is that understanding processes and relationships in the space of numbers can arise FROM being forced to learn many small truths over and over. A student can identify patterns (the shortcuts) from just learning the facts. Similarly you can get to the facts if you understand the process - like most math there's a lovely symmetry there that you seem unwilling to agree with me about. They both inform and train the brain differently and you seem to have benefitted from that yourself.

We need both, and rote memorization is especially useful in a small number of domains, irreplaceable. Anyone who has gone through an Anatomy & Physiology class successfully will agree too, and I can give more examples. There's no "process" or rules involved.

Anyway, I think we're mostly talking past each other and probably mostly agree.