In my opinion is a bad idea to add too much pressure to kids, making them compete in contest with absolutely no useful outcome.
When I was a kid I entered Mensa but went out soon because of the ill competition "I am smarter than you" stupidity from tests that had nothing to do with the real world. A constant ego battle between (in lots of non testable ways) retarded people.
For me it was mental onanism, most of the people there will score enormously in the IQ scores or playing chess but then fail in life: fail in love, fail in relationships and fail in health. They will use excuses to rationalize the fact that was known to them but I could see why: the environment was vicious.
In contrast at 15 or so I joined a group of crackers that were dam smart and we were doing things. Forty years old experts would say a protection was impossible to break and we will break it that same weekend.
It was so fun and we were doing things that nobody had done before. We did not earn a penny but it was one of the most useful experiences I ever had: Getting used to do things nobody has done before with a good team does improve other people's lifes(and your own as a result) dramatically.
Had I been forced to do that when I was a kid I would never had done it.
I was told I was genius, then that I was not(when I refused to make IQ scores anymore),just a precocious kid, and it was a great release, I had not pressure over my shoulders to please others' expectations.
I could do as much dumb things as kids do. I was happy as a kid, and I am very happy as an adult.
I feel sorry for this girls. Let girls be girls. Don't make them symbols of women fight against XY chromosomes. Let those girls decide if the want to become activist when they had grown up and could decide for themselves.
> making them compete in contest with absolutely no useful outcome.
Performing well at these contests means they will almost certainly be able to get any tech job they want (considering our interviews are just 'solve this algorithmic problem') and produce real useful outcome.
How do you supposedly kill mosquitoes without chemical dangerous products? Products that will kill people with cancer, asthma or birth defects.
How do you kill mosquitoes without killing bees and other useful insects that pollinize most of the agrarian production?
Most people ignore that on their own(using just wind to pollinize) the food that we cultivate the food production would be 5 percent or 10% of the current production. 50% of the world population will starve.
Bees already died en masse after the introduction of new pesticides, that had to be delayed in lots of places to study how they were accepting bees.
The healthier bees today live on cities like Paris which had forgotten pesticides in parks. The irony.
Ignorant people are very dangerous. Most people, specially experts on a specific field, are ignorant in most of the other areas.
Near my house there is a river 30 years ago some smart ass though it was a good idea to introduce an alien species of fish into it. No problem, the new fish was small and won't eat the local fish, they said.
Genius! The new fish eat all the eggs of local native population, that basically become extinct as a result.
Great tool. Years ago we started teaching kids Openscad(we volunteer teaching kids to make things with 3d printers, cnc mills, laser cutters, drill machines...), but right now we teach mostly to use freecad.
Openscad only for the most advanced kids for making parametric design. Parametric design(and other tools like blending or assembly) in Freecad is getting shape fast.
Not solidworks but totally free and without artificial constraints(pay for important features). We are convinced our kids will do amazing things when they grow up.
I am owner of different electric cars. I have an IT company so for us electric cars are more than a battery on wheels. It is a car you could put sensors on and do lots of stuff easily, like automatically drive and so on.
I don't consider BMW sales low. Quite the contrary. Read "The Innovation dilemma" to see what is happening here. Sales of electric are low compared to normal cars but they are extremely high for electric growing at an exponential rate.
So high that right now with the Tesla batteries alone in the next two years the price of lithium alone will double or triple, because the Gigafactory alone will produce in a year more batteries that are currently manufactured in the entire world today.
What is probably going to happen is that electric batteries need for cars will advance the development of new batteries that do not depend on lithium, like grapheme, because lithium availability is limited.
Everybody in power is Keynesian today. Everybody. That is an ideology created from Keynes books once he is dead. The last part is important because if you get to read Keynes, which most Keynesians have not, you would discover what Keynes said and what is Keynesianism is different, so it is very important that he is dead for him to agree with the current system.
In elite schools people are Keynesian, in central banks, in Government,and the media of course(New York Times, The Guardian,everybody) because they benefit from it basically taking resources from the majority of people into their pockets.
You find Austrian economist only in the private sector, but they had lost the war so far.
We had multiple QE, zero interest rates, now into negative territory, we had bail outs, now into bail ins(bank deposit confiscation).
That has a name and it is Keynesianism.
It did not work and we are worse today that before.
Their solution: double down. Banning cash so they could confiscate your savings. Higher taxes. And of course making Hayek and Mises alternatives the Scapegoat of all the mess that we suffer today.
By the way, Austrian economics and Neoliberalism are two different things.
I agree that everyone in power today is Keynesian. I also agree that "Keynesian" is not what Keynes wrote.
Long term, we may be worse off. But short term, Keynesian macro economic policy works. Collectively, society is too stupid for the alternative to work: don't centralize and don't panic.
> I agree that everyone in power today is Keynesian. I also agree that "Keynesian" is not what Keynes wrote.
You hit the proverbial nail in the head.
Sometimes it appears that the people in power picked up Keynes' book and instead of reading "borrow and spend away in recessions, cut spending and pay the debt during economic expansion", they just read "borrow and spend away" and that was it.
I do speed reading: It is real, I am part of a group in Europe that could read a novel in 30 minutes. We are more than 50 people.
The big drawback: we can't read anything that fast. We have to format the content in an specific way that we trained with. For example, reading long lines is a big no no. The idea is to maximize the circular area that you could read on a single eye stroke. With training you make the circular area bigger and bigger.
That is, we need to OCR the book or something that let's us create our own book in digital format(tablet) or decrypt the epub-pdf. That is illegal.
Why people love to speed read things like novels?
Because normal reading is boring and too slow. It is like being told to play football at 1km/hour max.
Quite interesting that people could only see barbarism outside, only the straw in the eyes of others:
How is that possible than an North American entity talking about barbarism totally ignores the extermination of native Americans?
Is there any better year 0 than after almost all Indians have been killed and their land stolen?
And yet, totally ignored by the author. History is written by the winners. Goering used to say that they only wanted to do in Eastern Europe what (North)Americans had already accomplished.
If you go to Mexico most people is Indian or mixed blood, you can see in their faces. On the US less than 1% of the population is Indian.
So you go to latin America and you hear about all the abuses of Spain, the Spain that forbid slavery in 1512. They care because they are the descendants of the Indians.
The same happened in Australia, they exterminated the native population and now nobody cares.
Agreed. I lived in Canada like 5 months or so with some friends. The country is so big that we used private airplanes to move around, which was very normal there.
The prices on Toronto smells Bubble so much that feels dangerous to be near that when it does pop.
>The prices on Toronto smells Bubble so much that feels dangerous to be near that when it does pop.
There may be a bubble, but you could also argue from basic supply and demand that until prices cause people to stay away from there and build new communities in less dense regions, they are still not high enough.
What is happening in the UK today is what happened in Spain 10 years ago, or what happened in Japan before Spain: A bubble created by easy money.
In Spain it was money coming from France, UK, and Germany. In UK it is money coming from Chinese and central banks, and people worrying about the stock market.
The big problem in developed countries is that they are old democracies. For the first time, most of the population of a country is not young, but old.
In the past, with pyramids of population, the younger population decided for their country, now it it old people who is majority.
This means young people could be sacrificed without consequences: taxes are being raised on the young and working populations to support elderly pensions. House prices are artificially sustained so old people does not lose their investments. Working benefits are cut on newcomers to support veterans.
In my company years ago we tested every single manufacturer 3d set for engineer applications. We were never excited about it, so we did not follow.
Personally I was not excited about it. Most people were never excited about it, only manufacturers that wanted to increase sales of expensive devices.
In fact, it was a huge marketing lie: stereoscopic is not 3d. It never was. Stereoscopic only gives you depth in a very close distance range:30-60 cms from the viewer(but you focus on your tv set a meter away or more), and with healthy people in the real wold just moving 1 centimeter side to side changes significantly your view at close ranges, something those sets are unable to do.
It was clear to me that "3d tvs" were never going to work.
I am very much sure VR is going to work great. It already works. We had been using expensive VR for CAD work for years now and it is worth every penny. It is the real 3D: move your head, your view changes.
In my opinion is a bad idea to add too much pressure to kids, making them compete in contest with absolutely no useful outcome.
When I was a kid I entered Mensa but went out soon because of the ill competition "I am smarter than you" stupidity from tests that had nothing to do with the real world. A constant ego battle between (in lots of non testable ways) retarded people.
For me it was mental onanism, most of the people there will score enormously in the IQ scores or playing chess but then fail in life: fail in love, fail in relationships and fail in health. They will use excuses to rationalize the fact that was known to them but I could see why: the environment was vicious.
In contrast at 15 or so I joined a group of crackers that were dam smart and we were doing things. Forty years old experts would say a protection was impossible to break and we will break it that same weekend.
It was so fun and we were doing things that nobody had done before. We did not earn a penny but it was one of the most useful experiences I ever had: Getting used to do things nobody has done before with a good team does improve other people's lifes(and your own as a result) dramatically.
Had I been forced to do that when I was a kid I would never had done it.
I was told I was genius, then that I was not(when I refused to make IQ scores anymore),just a precocious kid, and it was a great release, I had not pressure over my shoulders to please others' expectations.
I could do as much dumb things as kids do. I was happy as a kid, and I am very happy as an adult.
I feel sorry for this girls. Let girls be girls. Don't make them symbols of women fight against XY chromosomes. Let those girls decide if the want to become activist when they had grown up and could decide for themselves.