I'd be careful generalizing this beyond Germany; DE is a weird place to do studies about AC because it's so much less common there than it is in e.g. the USA.
However, anecdotally, it's not just women. It's basically everyone except for obese men.
Tough issue, especially since we don't allow partial nudity in work environments and it's much easier to put on a sweater than it is to lose weight (or, in some cases, muscle).
> Also, just my own opinion based on observation, why do cemeteries get all the best real estate?? Dead people can't enjoy that view.
Old cemeteries are de facto parks in cities that grow up around them. They're quite nice and a decent use of land in areas that don't have the sort of pressing housing needs that SFBA has.
Warning: it's ridiculously expensive. You need to be charging your users 4+ figures per license for your software in order to be able to pay Wolfram their cut.
The open/libre stuff is a huge red herring -- cost is the real bottleneck. It doesn't make any sense to use Wolfram/Mathematica unless there's a built-in function that you NEED, for which there is no alternative, and which requires a team of PhDs to re-implement.
E.g., even a non-production single user corporate desktop license is $3K.
If one of those companies decided to drop decent money on turning SciPy+Jupyter (or Julia) into a proper high-performance CAS, Wolfram would be in huge -- maybe existential -- trouble.
> 34 years old. Been writing software since I was 14.
We have very similar profiles.
I use calculus every day.
> Statistics is 100% for sure more useful to me, in everyday life and at work.
I use statistics every day too, working on ML systems.
> That's the thing I really ought to work to get better at.
The calculus comes in pretty damn quick. See also the third point in my original post; concretely, every ML course I've ever seen requires Calculus as a pre-requisite.
The KKK and the nazis managed to form and grow without the help of the internet. Also, finding other people who enjoy talking about cars or writing fan fic doesn't have this sort of harmful in-group/out-group dynamic.
So I'm a bit skeptical of the narrative of the piece, especially because there's no actual evidence provided.
My skepticism extends to the broader narrative of this newsletter.
Illich's alternatives -- especially the conviviality stuff -- always struck me as dangerously Utopian: if only we were all the same, then everything would be great.
He's like that well-meaning stoner who asks "why can't we all just get along" and sort of shakes his head and tells you that you don't get it if you ask how, concretely, we're supposed to "just get along" in Gaza or Darfur or Kashmir or any other place where there's a lot of zero-sum resource/power allocation underlying centuries of conflict. The dismissal of real and concrete harms on both sides of conflict is at least unhelpful and possibly harmful.
Conviviality is a nice sentiment, and the world would perhaps be a better place if everyone shared that sentiment. But sentiment is a starting point, not an actual solution. The world's problems are usually too complex to be solved with pure sentiment, and things will go wrong in unexpected ways if you try.
One concrete example: the modern commercial internet's ad-driven information economy elucidates a major flaw with Illich's "Learning Webs" from Deschooling Society: the company that owns the platform just happens to be an ad company. It's a flaw that even the strongest critics of Illich could never have anticipated in the 1970s.
The point is more general: convivial societies only work if everyone is convivial, and there will always be insanely inventive non-convivial people. Even people who are more-or-less decent folks and even people who adopt slogans like "don't be evil" will end up throwing wrenches in your plan.
> 1. It's not clear that AP Stat disadvantages students versus AP Calc.
This is what stuck out to me.
Isn't AP Calculus the obvious choice if you have to choose between AP Stats and AP Calculus?
1. Calculus is really, really useful. Maybe AP Stats is also useful, but singling out Calculus as an example of useless signalling sets off really loud alarm bells.
2. If you want a STEM/Engineering degree, at least one Calculus course is required. More importantly, often a long sequence of 2-4 courses (Calculus I, II, III and ODEs) are required. Because of that long list of sequentially dependent required courses, getting one or two calculus courses out of the way in high school is enormously useful (like, "graduate a semester earlier for each course" useful). AP Stats is not at the head of this sort of long sequential course dependency.
3. The AP Stats course has a major disadvantage: lots of colleges/majors that require a stats course don't accept AP Stats as credit because they require a calculus-based statistics course.
What a weird and unnecessary rant.