I'd love an example too, and an example of the classical system that this replaced. I'm willing to believe the worst of the school system, but I'd like to understand why.
Yeah, a whole lot of Americans who still click the "religious" box on a poll are just going on habit and family tradition, or they go to a church that's become part social club and part community charity center. (Nothing wrong with charity, of course, but you don't have to be religious to be charitable.) It doesn't mean what it meant a few generations ago, when, probably coincidentally, there was less crime.
Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
I've noticed in a lot of newer movies, people's phones only vibrate and they always notice it and grab it (unless the script says they miss the call/text for plot reasons). Of course, the scene is always quiet at that moment, so you can hear the vibration effect and believe that the character does too. In real life, it doesn't often work that way.
It seems odd because it assumes you agree that silent prayer would make people feel unsafe, and that prayer is a form of "freedom of thought." You could agree that freedom of thought is a human right, but not think that applies to prayer. You could also think silent prayer outside abortion clinics won't make people feel unsafe, but still think it should be banned. Unless you agree with at least one of the assumptions they're baking into the answers, you can't give a satisfactory answer.
The question itself is very simple, and the answers should be "yes" and "no." All the rest is message.
I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things like that. Forty years later, I'm trying to go back to cursive because it's faster, but it's a whole lot harder now.
Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I'll often type it in so I've got it saved in a searchable, archivable form. But putting it on paper first seems to help me think about it. It's like I see the words in a deeper way than when I'm putting them on the screen.
> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders.
I'm starting to get asked, "Could AI help you do such-and-such faster?" At first I tried to explain why the answer is no, because such-and-such doesn't lend itself to what AI is good at. But I'm starting to realize I'm going to have to tell them I am using it and maybe give them an example once in a while, because they're hearing too much about its wonderfulness to believe there's something it can't help with. They're going to think I'm just being stubborn even though I tell them I'm not opposed to using AI where it makes sense. If that means the job actually takes a little longer to add in the part where I use AI to speed it up, they'll be happier.
I served on a grand jury a while back, and one of the few cases that wasn't a slam dunk was one where a woman's baby smothered while in bed with her and under the covers, possibly while the mother was using someone else's prescription drugs. Some of us were queasy at the idea of potentially putting a parent in prison, thinking that losing your own child and carrying that guilt was punishment enough, plus the question of what would happen to her other children, who by all accounts were well cared for (she was a single parent with no father in the picture).
We quizzed the prosecutor about it, and he said he understood that, but, as he put it, "A child is dead." He hoped to use the seriousness of the charge to get the mother to accept counseling and supervision as part of a plea deal; but his office couldn't just let it go, which is what a lesser charge effectively would do in my state. After he explained that, he got the indictment. Maybe this prosecutor is thinking the same way.
It's unlikely that the people in that rural subdivision are driving two hours a day for work. In the US Midwest, you're rarely more than 30 minutes from a town large enough to have some jobs. For instance, there's a town of 1100 near me that has a veterinarian, general store, post office, gas station, auto mechanic, school, a couple bank branches, and so on, which all employ people, some at pretty good salaries. And within ten miles of that town, there are a couple of those little blocks of suburb-looking houses like you describe.
Or the people living in them might be retired, or work from home, or work on local farms. Whatever the case, they're not driving a long way for work.
If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring and then scrap it after a few years and hire domestic again because it went poorly. There may be a new surge of interest in it if importing people gets harder, but I don't suppose it will go much better than it did before.
How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?
The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.
Some of the most irrational people I've met were those who claimed to make all their decisions rationally, based on facts and logic. They're just very good at rationalizing, and since they've pre-defined their beliefs as rational, they never have to examine where else they might come from. The rest of us at least have a chance of thinking, "Wait, am I fooling myself here?"
Probably. Whatever method I use, physical or digital, it tends to fade into the background after a while and I stop noticing it. My best bet might be to switch to a new method every few weeks, in which case it's probably best to keep them simple and cheap. Maybe a whiteboard for a while, then a notebook, then a text file, and so on looping through a few basic methods.
Maybe virtual tasks need better organization or reminders than physical tasks. I rarely forget to wash my dishes because the dishes are right there. I don't forget to go gather the eggs because I have to shut up the chickens every night and check their food and water, or living creatures could die. There are physical consequences and reminders of those things.
The need to update a piece of software doesn't give me any physical cues, and if I have a couple dozen tasks like that waiting on me, I'm never going to remember them all unless they're all popping into my head throughout the day. That pretty much is how I used to try to do it, and it wasn't good.
Ditto. Being broke has always been existential, and pretty damn scary even if you had family and other resources you could lean on. Nothing's changed about that, though particular industries/regions may get better or worse.
It kind of surprises me that they never confuse "it's" and "its" and common mistakes like that, when it seems like most human writers today swap them randomly. I suppose that's thanks to a lot of the text in the training data predating the collapse of English education.
I'm not sure why em dashes are so popular, though. I don't think I've ever seen human writing that had as many em dashes as LLMs use.