The best business writing advice I ever got was "always answer more questions than you raise". It's usually clear when something is going to raise questions. I'm with you wrt guessing what questions readers will have, but reading critically can identify where you have unsupported claims, incomplete explanations, and confusing or conflicting statements.
My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess.
When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.
I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional.
She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition.
When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.
IMO: a whole lot of this, in circles like ours, is Bloom's two sigma effect. (Individual tutorial methods routinely produce results similar to what you get at the top of a normal class).
The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.
Thanks, I did not know about that term, but it fits in with other things I have read and my own experience.
While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading.
Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child.
[1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.
She does seem to have a talent for languages. Not many people pick up that many easily. I have even managed to forget a language I was fluent in (I was bilingual and I spoke Sinhala as well as I did English, and could read and write it to the level expected by schools at my age until I was six) as a child. It has a phonetic alphabet, BTW.
As far as reading goes she sounds broadly similar to us - including the taste for SF. Did you have problems deciding on whether books were sufficiently age appropriate or not? There were quite a few where I had to balance a book being good with whether it was suitable (mostly because of violence).
I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.
We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.
I bought Levi's 501s at a farm supply store in the 80s, $12 on sale. About 10 years ago I gave away my two remaining pairs. They were a little thinner but still intact, no holes anywhere. Modern 501s are made of much thinner fabric; I'd be surprised if they would last 5 years. Looks like the sale price is $45 now, which seems comparable.
I bought a pair of 501s recently and they barely lasted 6 months. I do a fair bit of cycling which seemed to very quickly wear through them. I'm really not sure what to buy if I want things that last a long time now.
Levis are fashion products, not workwear. But even if they were, if you want things to last a long time then buy things made for a specific purpose. Denim products made by cycling brands are a rarity for a reason.
Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.
I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.
I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.
Once I stated reading that dashboard (a couple of weeks ago) I could not stop. It's a real page turner. My favourite moment (spoiler):
> Abolish the Federal Reserve and move to a "free banking" system.
Don't let that reveal dint your interest. In the Handmaids Tale such a long list of horrors would have bored the reader, but in the Administrations blueprint for the USA that already has 41% of the items off in just 100 days it's riveting reading.
I can resist pointing out another highlight for me:
> Lessen child labor regulations to allow "teenage workers" to work "inherently dangerous jobs".
In sure Project 2025 is sustained to become a true classic.
The data seem to show that at the end of Biden's term, ICE enforcement actions were very low. But for some reason, the stats page doesn't show Trump's previous term. https://www.ice.gov/statistics
Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.
So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.
The question we have to ask ourselves is why was ICE not empowered to conduct enforcement ? Why were border crossings up over Biden’s term and then when Trump is elected and comes into office they drop dramatically ?
I recently started reading a great book called "Democracy for Realists". Voters may believe that they are electing someone who will represent their principles, but that is not how it works.
`layout python` means that the venv is managed by the layout script in direnv, but when sourcing manually I can create it with uv (or pyenv, because I sometimes need to pin the python version) and then just add the source line.
`layout python` is great when that just works. I have trouble juggling various Python version effectively with direnv's layout script (I _know_ I'm doing something wrong, but I can just set up a virtual env as a one time operation so...)
(I also like sourcing bceause I know _exactly_ what's happening, as I know more about the activation scripts than the layout script direnv provides. But that's just a personal thing)
