I don't think you're being fair to Chris Penner. He ends his blog post with: "It may take me another 5 years to finally finish it, but at some point we'll continue this journey and explore how we can sequence effects using the hierarchy of Category classes instead." Emphasis by me.
So while it is true, that what he has described so far is not sufficiently powerful for normal programs, he has clearly stated that there are more abstractions between Applicative and Monad to explore than what he has presented so far.
It appears Jeff Bezos has partially doxed Howard Dylan. In the email he published he removed Dylan's phone number and email address, but the image included, probably as Dylan's signature, clearly shows his phone number and email address.
Taler is free in the sense of libre software, but it is not a free payment system. In their demo they added a small transaction fee. However, because it is not a crypto currency they can greatly reduce the transaction fees.
The linked PDF also has an online version which is superior in many ways because it has inline executable Sage examples. It can be found at: http://abstract.pugetsound.edu/aata/
Also, this textbook is one of several open source textbooks developed using MathBook XML which allows authors to create multiple output formats such as PDF, HTML and ePub from one canonical source document written in XML. If you are interested in learning about MathBook XML you should check out: http://mathbook.pugetsound.edu/
The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture.
This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and I can corroborate that Japanese people struggle with their own language. For example, the development of word processing has made the problem even worse. When Japanese people consistently use computers for writing they call themselves "Wa-pu-ro baka" (translation "word processing idiot") because they quickly forget how to write kanji by hand.
Actually it is two rants in one. The first rant is about how college level educational standards are very different in the U.S. and Japan. Although I never attended university in Japan, I've met many Japanese college students and their stories corroborate the author's claims of ridiculously easy grading standards.
In the sense that the author uses the word "retarded" to mean that it takes Japanese longer to learn their language than other cultures then yes, the author is correct. Japanese students take until 6th grade to learn the 2,000 most common kanji characters. Most middle schoolers cannot read a newspaper. Heck even most high schoolers shy away from newspapers in Japan.
Manga (comics) are the way most Japanese learn their language. One of the reasons that manga are so helpful is their usage of furigana which are small hiragana (phonetic alphabet) characters printed next to the more difficult kanji characters (pictograms).
Japanese people come in a wide range of IQs just like any other culture. In my experience they are not any more stupid nor any more intelligent than the average U.S. citizen. They do often forget kanji characters, just like you would. It is common for Japanese to ask someone to jog their memory on how a character is written. In this case, people often respond by drawing the character on their palm or saying something like, "anshin no an" meaning it is the same "an" character as in the word "anshin". Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn.
I lived in Japan for nearly 3 years. I speak, or at least used to speak with fair fluency and I can confirm that this is somewhat accurate. I would add that many Japanese high schools are highly selective and very demanding of students. Graduates of these high schools often perform well in academic subjects and often overachieve in U.S. universities, but only the best students get into those high schools and many students are forced to choose from much less competitive schools.
In short, education through high school is often very demanding, but Japanese colleges are quite easy for liberal arts students. Much less so for STEM subjects.
So while it is true, that what he has described so far is not sufficiently powerful for normal programs, he has clearly stated that there are more abstractions between Applicative and Monad to explore than what he has presented so far.