I was just fooling around.

If you think you’re too good to get your hands dirty planting new-cat seeds, and you just want to enjoy them once they leave the vine, you’ve really got some thinking to do.

Interesting. Good to have a less rent-seeking option, not sure I love the idea of the Fed just (assumedly) having access to all my transactions, though.

These are arguments to refuse censorship much harder, not to comply.

Really wish we would all shun this voluntary self-censoring of very mild words. Fuck the platforms and their algorithms and fuck the people who censor basic language.

Haha hell yeah, enjoy!

AC6 was so great, I went directly from NG -> NG+ -> NG++, which I never do. Never wanted it to end.

Eh? C’mon you gotta elaborate on that!

where all the tubes and knobs rise out of it and retract back in

what the fuck

PBS FTW, been digging their stuff since I was a toddler watching Sesame Street lol. Their PBS Eons channel (on YT…) is great, when I was watching more video content I enjoyed their streaming service for a range of stuff too, can’t remember what it was called now though.

So yeah give em some bucks folks and watch cool stuff, they really need it.

Couldn’t agree more. Parenting failures are the root of so much (though being charitable, there are many parents in working conditions that basically destroy their ability to parent effectively). Regardless of parents, any kid is shaped (raised) in big ways by the communities they participate in. I’ve got no problem telling a little knucklehead - even one I’ve never met - to quit mistreating folks in various ways when I see it. And I wish more people would too.

But I also recognize that has the potential to really blow up (even violently) depending on the kid’s parents and the scenario. But still, many of us just recoil from even the idea of a disagreement, and that’s the mechanism that allows this stuff to fester in our youth. Take responsibility for your society, be mean to a kid who needs it today!

Ah, but yet…

Gross.

First I’m hearing of a King of the Hill remake. Nothing is sacred :(

Woof, that’s hilarious and annoying. Food service from what I understand has super thin margins - things like fountain drink sodas (and alcohol sales at other spots) do a lot of the work on keeping the place economically viable. Not excusing that guy’s pettiness but if you see weird behavior around a specific ingredient or item, it’s probably something along those lines.

I think it’s probably being in the age range that kinda straddled the time between now - when it’s all an unshakeable piece of daily life - and the time before it existed / was commonplace. Having grown up before all of these world changing tech advances, and then being there for the ride, is just a singular experience and perspective neither our parents or our kids can possibly have.

I’m really grateful for having gotten to take the ride, but it does strike me as sad in a way.

I’m advocating for a mixed approach that serves more kids, and arguing that you had such a mixed approach yourself but don’t seem to acknowledge it.

Memorization (done properly, that is - I invoked “spaced repetition”, an evidence-based learning technique from the field of education, you’re the one talking about corporal punishment from nuns) is effective in precisely this and related domains having tons of minutiae.

It’s not that learning the process is inefficient, that’s not what I meant - learning only the process and not focusing on rote memorization as well leaves you with only the process to rely on when learning further math (your experience sounds like you got both, regarding multiplication).

Relying on only rules/processes to complete intermediate steps that are not the subject under instruction is what is inefficient. Using rules to reach simple multiplication facts when trying to learn algebra or even just long division is brutal for kids with any attention difficulty whatsoever. By the time they’ve solved the multiplication answer they wanted, they’ve lost the thread on the new concept. Rote memorization reduces the effort needed to use multiplication when learning everything else. It doesn’t feel that you’re reading very carefully here, but it could be me who failed to make myself plain.

I myself am a process guy and high on pattern-seeking. I write software for a living and live in abstractions layered on abstractions - even the physics is invisible lol, nothing (but fans and I guess HDD heads where still used) ever moves. It all feels like pretend!

My point is that understanding processes and relationships in the space of numbers can arise FROM being forced to learn many small truths over and over. A student can identify patterns (the shortcuts) from just learning the facts. Similarly you can get to the facts if you understand the process - like most math there’s a lovely symmetry there that you seem unwilling to agree with me about. They both inform and train the brain differently and you seem to have benefitted from that yourself.

We need both, and rote memorization is especially useful in a small number of domains, irreplaceable. Anyone who has gone through an Anatomy & Physiology class successfully will agree too, and I can give more examples. There’s no “process” or rules involved.

Anyway, I think we’re mostly talking past each other and probably mostly agree.

You’re a real one!

I don’t mean to be picking fights with you but this is a topic I care about - I really think it’s a mistake to say “I was exposed to this material much earlier and therefore picked it up faster and more robustly” and then claim that’s an argument against rote memorization. Especially considering how few kids are keeping up in math. Your experience was very fortunate and largely uncommon.

The rules and shortcuts you’re describing are absolutely part of the work I’m doing with my daughter, but they go hand-in-hand with the “spaced repetition” (ish) approach we’re focusing on, of just iterating a lot. One without the other is much weaker - mnemonics are extremely valuable aids, but none of it sticks without repetition. I’d say that all tasks involving remembering lots of minutiae (contrasted with remembering processes) greatly benefit from mnemonics, but fully require rote memorization practice in order to have the dexterity needed for quick recall that doesn’t get in the way. So things like chemistry, anatomy, case law.

It’s true that multiplication can be kept strictly a “learn the process” task, but your other points kind of just say that the repetition that comes in a person’s life later on finishes that work / replaces the dedicated memorization phase. And frankly the process you went through sounds like it involved a standard amount of repetition, you just had a head start so it didn’t feel as new or as uncomfortable.

I say only learning the processes is extremely inefficient and will make learning any more advanced math much, much harder. Lacking that strong basis of recall, kids have to think to do the multiplication that is merely an intermediate step and not at all part of the material being learned, moving forward. This reduces (greatly) their ability to engage with the actual subject matter because they are already working to complete the intermediate steps. I’ve seen it happen firsthand - I think you mean well, but I think your POV on multiplication is way wrong and actually harmful here.

E: I’m conflating mnemonics with arithmetic shortcuts here, I hope you’ll forgive that. They’re related - remembering one arithmetic shortcut gives you access to many answers, and usually mnemonics serve a similar “get lots of stuff for one significant remembered thing” kind of role.

Completely agree with you. But hilariously, 9 stacks of 6 bricks only accounts for 54 of them…please don’t change it lmao