Will this GOP candidate forum include any fancy pageant walking? https://t.co/i1ynnrFAcu
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) October 20, 2023
(Because Rep. Frost is awesome here, and my post last night got bigfooted):
.@RepMaxwellFrost with the perfect response to House Republican chaos: "We've been fighting to save food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, this entire year as Republicans have been working to take it away…I'm just letting them pull themselves up by their bootstraps." pic.twitter.com/w4AZQDjVCI
— CAP Action (@CAPAction) October 20, 2023
I must admit that watching Jim Jordan get clustercucked on TV for a few days is deeply soul-affirming and my only regret is that the need for a functioning-adjacent government means it cannot continue indefinitely
— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) October 18, 2023
Official take: LOL. So the 'lets wrap this up supersize McHenry & have Jim be shadow Speaker' idea has completely imploded over like 90 minutes, will absolutely not happen and GOPs appear to have literally no idea what to do. They don't even seem to have any stupid ideas.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 19, 2023
Have we tried turning the House GOP off and turning it on again?
— Expat_Matt (@Expat_Matt) October 19, 2023
This guy sat in the Speaker Chair longer than Jim Jordan did. pic.twitter.com/OJXOsidloQ
— Rick Lenzie (@RickLenzie) October 20, 2023
As the saying goes, “Democrats fall in line, Republicans fall in love”
Oh wait… https://t.co/DrnQPNJe34
— Tony (@realtonysm1th) October 19, 2023
It’s ok. For these folks, losing is just another way to fundraise. https://t.co/Tfcqodouif
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) October 18, 2023
Democrats keep talking about needing a Speaker so Congress can get work done for the American people
Republicans keep talking about wanting a Speaker so they can advance their conservative agenda.
The party of the Constitution vs the party of Trump’s insurrection.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 18, 2023
Brilliant speech today on the House floor from Congresswoman Katherine Clark against Gym Jordan. Everyone should see this.pic.twitter.com/X40VAuqc2w
— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) October 20, 2023
“My sides hurt, from not laughing out loud in front of the media”…
Reporter: Do you have a view of Jim Jordan’s current predicament?
President Biden, smiling: I ache for him pic.twitter.com/VAADSYH0XW
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) October 18, 2023
For the record, 208 Democrats did not vote to remove McCarthy. They voted FOR Hakeem Jeffries.
— Greg Pinelo (@gregpinelo) October 20, 2023
"Can you believe this GOP Sh*t Show?" pic.twitter.com/vOvz8rS3kK
— KAMALA NATION (@KamalaNation) October 19, 2023
eclare
What a great photo of Nancy and Hakeem.
lowtechcyclist
Best use ever of Abbie Hoffman’s phrase!
(in the editorial cartoon up top)
OzarkHillbilly
Gonna be another beautiful Ozark autumn day.
Mousebumples
Good morning! Thanks for the roundup, AL! I think Rep. Frost had a great line. (I think it was from his appearance on Colbert?)
Reminder – postcards and music thread tonight! Postcards to Voters has addresses for Ohio (Issue 1) and Dave Calone in NY right now. Virginia Democrats also have a great postcard program for their candidates, though I can’t remember the link off hand.
Hope you can make it
ETA – WaterGirl has a bunch of links here. Virginia opportunities include Postcard Patriots again, which is run by MazeDancer.
OzarkHillbilly
Cruises, golf and private health: how baby boomer spending has kept UK inflation stubbornly high
Boy, us boomers get blamed for everything.
(no I haven’t read the article, I just couldn’t help laughing at the headline)
bbleh
I’ll agree with the Republicans about being united at least on ONE issue: hating Democrats.
They really have become the ODD party. It’s no wonder they nominated Jordan.
Treatment of ODD typically involves psychotherapy (which takes time) and training of parents and schools (which presumes a nominal authority relationship). That’s three strikes, so … ??
Geminid
Katherine Clark is really good. That is a very solid leadership team House Democrats elected last November. Caucus Chsirman Pete Aguilar does not get as much attention as Jeffries and Clark, but he’s very solid too.
eclare
@Geminid:
Yes, we are in good hands.
bbleh
@OzarkHillbilly: what bugs me is the near-daily lurching from “too much spending is fueling inflation!!” to “too little spending is driving us into recession!!” The media so desperately want some sort of economic crisis that they cherry-pick shamelessly, contradict themselves openly, and never present any good news without spinning it as probably actually bad. And the narrative substantially affects people’s perceptions and beliefs. They may get their crisis yet, if only because they create it.
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: We’ll also have a pretty day here in the Virginia Piedmont.; maybe a little on the windy side. Leaves here are just starting to turn, but they’re further along over in the Valley.
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly:
Seriously…boomers are responsible? What was that other big thing….oh yeah….Brexit! That has nothing to do with the UK’s bad economy? Right.
NotMax
Glean that we could use a short breather.
Respite alert: Evolution of Cartoon Music (1928 – 2020).
:)
Kay
@Mousebumples:
I received a postcard last week.
58% would be great, but this poll seems hinky to me. 59% of Democrats voting “yes” seems low. They polled some pretty conservative Democrats if only 60% of them are pro choice.
Geminid
@eclare: Hakeem Jeffries entered Congress in 2012, and Pete Aguilar flipped his Southern California seat in 2014, at age 34 I think. Before that, Aguilar served several terms as Mayor of Redlands. I sometimes call him “the other Mayor Pete.”
Rep. Clark has been in Congress the longest, I think.
OzarkHillbilly
@Geminid: We are at peak color right now, which due to how dry everything is, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of color at all.
@eclare: Brexit is the fault of boomers too. Probably some truth to that.
Mousebumples
Awesome! I hope issue 1 is won by the Yes side.
Also, polling is so broken. Not to say polls are never right, but non response is an issue, along with whatever stats pollsters do to get a “representative sample”.
Kay
@bbleh:
I’ve been a huge booster of the Biden economy – I just think it’s a fact that it’s a great economy- but that said bankruptcies are starting to rise. That’s the measure I use – personal bankruptcy filings, Chapters 7 and 13. They’re going up.
But it won’t tank prior to the 2024 election. Bankruptcy is an early indicator. They started to rise in 2007 in NW OH which is when I knew the Bush economy was headed for the skids :)
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: The article is interesting just for its description of how amazing British boomers’ pensions are. I’m certainly never going to experience anything like that.
bbleh
@Kay: true, but bankruptcies are still only about half what they were just 4 years ago, and about the same as 2 years ago. One might also say that they’re just returning to baseline.
One can never go wrong predicting an eventual recession. But as to when the next one will be, I concur it will be too late to affect the ’24 elections (unless the Republicans manage to sabotage things REALLY badly, and at this point it’s a little hard to see how they could do that), and it may not even be ’til the following year or later. So far, we seem to be on track for about as “soft a landing” as I’ve seen in a while …
trnc
I know everyone here probably knows this, but the Houle tweet was out of date as of around noon yesterday when Jordan blew through his own embarrassing record of failure.
Perhaps trying to get votes for speaker should not be the very first time in 15 years a MOC introduces something to vote on.
MFA
“Will this GOP candidate forum include any fancy pageant walking?”
No, but there will be a lawsuit competition.
SFAW
That tweet from Mike Collins reminds of a phrase we used to use when I was young:
“The balls on that guy”
It was not used in an admiring tone, of course
BruceFromOhio
@Kay: There is some very interesting data in that survey. Brief glance, rural Republican male evangelicals with guns remain bonkers, and Ohio Dems have an opportunity to improve outreach to independents. TFG unfavorables among R’s was surprising, though I’d love to see this same poll again in a year. Was interesting to see a tiny softening in support for abortion rights in the ’22-’23 comparative, but so small it was well within MoE.
One month to election day, you have to be pretty insulated not to know what Issue 1 is and how you’re going to vote. Even if all undecided voters responding to the survey switched to “No” it would still pass.
The local Dem club met Thursday night, and the chair kicked it off saying “All 50 states are watching what happens in Ohio with Issue 1.” Suddenly all those yard signs, door hangers and postcards looked like a pretty good investment.
Not resting on laurels, and it’s certainly not over until it’s over, and my takeaway is keep chasing every vote. Not gonna Eeyore it either, I was feeling better about it passing than before. I’m also curious how much coat-tailing there is from Issue 2 to get the youngsters to the polls.
Thank you for sharing this!
WereBear
Good morning! Finally feels like Saturday.
I’ve been doing thiamine therapy for fatigue (autoimmune), and DAMN.
The first phase is more fatigue because it’s clearing out dysfunctional mitochronidria. I literally could drive fine, but could not think :) But now I feel sooo much better.
The cycle will continue, but shouldn’t be this low again. We live in hope.
lowtechcyclist
@MFA:
:golf clap:
eclare
@trnc:
Burn! Love it.
lowtechcyclist
@SFAW:
Yeah, how weird that all the Democrats would vote for a Democrat for Speaker.
I wonder how many Rethugs voted for Pelosi in 2019 or 2021. I’m too lazy to look it up, but I’m guessing a very round number in both cases.
eclare
@WereBear:
Fingers crossed you continue to improve!
BruceFromOhio
@Mousebumples: The methodology on the poll Kay linked was pretty solid. It was simple, noted the number of respondents and the margin of error by question. The questions were mostly simple one-liners, and the cross-tabs were straightforward.
I share your misgivings about polling, particularly the stinkers touted by the fascists. This one appears to my untrained eye to be appropriate, though confirmation bias is definitely in play.
Geminid
@Kay: I’ve read that the strength of RV manufacturing is another indicator of recessionary pressures. Like, if America sneezes, Elkhart Indiana catches a cold.
Kay
@BruceFromOhio:
I voted against Issue 2. I know this position is unpopular among Democrats but I am telling you I work in juvenile courts and teenagers are using a ton of high potency marijuana products. The most vulnerable among them did not need another hurdle to overcome and now they have one.
I think they should regulate it like they do alcohol, as to potency and consistency. I don’t think this laissez-faire approach to what is a huge industry aligns with my values. The whole thing needs to be rethought and treated like any other business. Regulate and monitor it. Until they do I’m a “no”.
NotMax
Boring snippet of an abode upgrade. initially visually jarring, half a day later getting used to the new configuration on the trusty ol’ computer desk.
Dual monitors. Desktop has a hutch on its rear half which spans half desktop’s length; monitor #1 atop that. Other half, attached to hutch, taken up with an angled shelf 3½ inches above the desktop. Monitor #2 sat on that shelf. lower than #1 for years and years and years. On a sudden whim, looked around online and found stackable sturdy metal units of shelves and drawers which meet my nominal aesthetic sensibilities, my budget and also fit on that angled shelf so as to be able to move #2 14 inches higher; it is now nearly parallel with #1.
As monitor #2 is the one which by my choice displays the browser screen (and thus B-J) was very offputting at first. ;)
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
There has to be a typo in there somewhere. There’s no way you can get a weighted average of 59%, 39%, and 51% to come out to 58%. Unless the 59% group is practically the entire sample, which wouldn’t make sense.
Kay
@Geminid:
Ah, Elkhart. They have the RV museum there.
I just look at bankruptcy in NW OH, that district. It’s the auto loans that are killing them. They can’t handle any other loan payment after the truck payment or they’re headed right for a 7.
Mousebumples
@BruceFromOhio: You know Ohio better than I do, for sure, so I’ll defer to you on the poll on question. I just am a skeptic, overall. Hoping for wiiiiiide margins in favor!
Anne Laurie
Clark — as you probably remember me mentioning — is my own rep, so I’m biased. But, yes, she’s great!
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
I strongly concur. Regulate dope just like you’d regulate anything else you can buy over the counter for personal use.
BruceFromOhio
@Kay: Understood, and thank you for your perspective and background. And a big THANK YOU for your work in juvenile courts system.
@Mousebumples: I defer to Kay, she’s way smarter than I am.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
Then there’s the hacking cough. Teenagers always smoked pot – hell, I smoked pot as a teenager- but I never used to see every single teenager who comes thru the juvie system with this low, honking COUGH.
kalakal
@Matt McIrvin:
Huh. Final salary pensions are good and they’re definitely a Boomer thing these days but the UK state pension is amongst the lowest in the Western world at just over £200 a week with a qualifying period of 35 years to get the full amount. I’m pissed off at them raising the qualifying age a couple of years ago from 65 to 67. If I’d been born 11 months earlier I’d get it at 65, as it is I have to wait till I’m 66 and a half
catclub
Now do Australia. They have ( had) gone decades with no recession.
WereBear
@Kay: While I agree with you, that’s not what is being offered.
I know LOTS of people who are accessing needed medical treatment now, because while we’ve had medical legislation, it was worded so that someone had to be dying to qualify, and the list of conditions was woefully small.
Going into it with the same strictures as alcohol is the right way to do it. But I’ll take half a loaf. My compromises are sliced in different shapes, that’s all
I don’t think teens should have unfettered access, either. But sometimes they don’t get much in the way of other coping strategies. That’s where I’d like to see more effort. Like banning those destructive “teen camps” that would be illegal if it were adults.
Prohibition should have taught us more lessons, faster.
TriassicSands
it seems likely that the best thing the House Republicans will have done at the end of this Congress will have been rejecting Jim Jordan as Speaker. It is remarkably pathetic when the best thing a party can do is keep a monster like Jordan from leading their party in the House. He should never have been considered.
It isn’t endorsing Steve Scalise to say that when he and Jordan went head-to-head, the only vote Jordan should have gotten was his own.
Note: Keeping the government open and avoiding default are neither good nor bad, they’re simply necessary. As usual, Nancy Mace shone as perhaps the most hypocritical Republican in the House.
@bbleh: ODD
The Mayo Clinic defines ODD in the context of children vs. adults. That fits the Republicans perfectly.
WereBear
@kalakal: I feel you! I got in just under the wire in the US. Makes me SO mad.
WereBear
@TriassicSands: I see current Republicans as people who never grew up. Like, you still call yourself a Republican and DON’T try to take back your party?
Ya’ll deserve each other.
H.E.Wolf
@Kay: I received a postcard last week. [hinky poll details at Kay’s link]
@BruceFromOhio: my takeaway is keep chasing every vote. [local details at Bruce’s link]
GOTV – with postcards having a measurable positive effect – makes a difference.
New writers, come join us! Let’s hand the anti-choicers a thunderous defeat.
Yarrow
@WereBear: I haven’t heard about thiamine therapy. How does that work? How did you hear about it?
narya
@Kay: I have been saying for decades that I want pot to be sold like alcohol, i.e., with the ABV on the label. I first smoked it at 14, and I stopped 5 or 6 years later because it had started getting stupid strong, and I just don’t enjoy that (I tend to vomit, actually). I want the session beer of pot, not the barrel-aged quad with a shot of grain alcohol on the side. I don’t want to forbid the latter, but I want to be able to be an informed customer.
I also don’t want people’s lives ruined by/for pot.
When I was doing my dissertation research I stumbled across a survey of high school seniors; one question was whether they’d ever smoked pot. The percentage of “yes” peaked in 1976 (the year I graduated), and it was something like 75%-80%. But that was mostly ditchweed, not the stuff that’s out there now.
Betty Cracker
Italian politics sound more interesting than ours:
The current Italian prime minister is a right winger. Meanwhile, our dumb wingnut goons are yelling at each other in “cloakrooms.”
NotMax
@kalakal
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
The COVID un/underemployment payments staved off a lot of that. A number of people who were in trouble over pre-COVID Trump Regime stagflation as to wages caught up and some did some long-put-off necessary things – but some didn’t.
There go two miscreants
@bbleh: Here is a good read (not too long) on exactly that subject:
What is driving sentiment?
kalakal
@NotMax: Don’t know where you got that from
Here’s the UK.gov guidance
“1.2.1 Legislated State Pension age rises
From 1948 until 2010, the State Pension age was 60 for women and 65 for men. The Pensions Act 1995 introduced the equalisation of State Pension age for men and women, with women’s pensionable age set to increase to 65 between 2010 and 2020…
As a result of the Pensions Commission’s recommendations, the Pensions Act 2007 legislated to increase State Pension age for both men and women to age 66 between 2024 and 2026, age 67 between 2034 and 2036 and age 68 between 2044 and 2046.
The Pensions Act 2011 accelerated the timetable for equalising State Pension age at 65, so that it was completed in November 2018, and brought forward the increase in State Pension age to 66 to between 2018 and 2020. The Pensions Act 2014 brought forward the increase to 67 to between 2026 and 2028.
The current legislated pathway is for the State Pension age to rise to 67 between 2026 and 2028 and 68 between 2044 and 2046. The legislation stipulates that this Review must consider whether this pathway is appropriate. ”
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-pension-age-review-2023-government-report/state-pension-age-review-2023
Cheryl from Maryland
@Kay: exactly right. Maryland set up regulations for growers, stores, users, where one could smoke, and where/how much one could grow one’s own when it legalized medical marijuana. It took a while, and people were complaining, but it ended up running well, with significant tax revenue. When recreational marijuana became available this summer, at first only the pre-approved medical sources could supply and sell. Now the state, using the pre-existing framework, will be accepting new applications for recreational. The state is getting many buyers from Virginia and DC for consistent, regulated cannabis.
Barbara
@Kay: Kay, totally on board with your views on issue 2. Giving corporate purveyors free rein to market a psychoactive substance without any limits is stupid.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@narya:
As I tell my own adult kids (BTW, never smoke your kids’ weed – way too strong, I found to my regret), “when I was a kid, all we had was shitty ditch weed full of stems and popping seeds. We were grateful, and liked it!”
NotMax
@kalakal
Oh, Britain.
The 1983 date was when U.S. Social Security retirement enrollment changed.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I think they will eventually have to start charging drivers in crashes for having a THC level higher than a set standard. Weed might not affect motor coordination like alccohol does, but it can definitely affect attentiveness and judgement.
There was a famous crash in western Albemarle County a few years ago, when a trash truck ran in front of a special Amtrak train carrying the Republican House caucus to a retreat in West Virginia. The truck driver was charged with manslaughter.
The prosecutor wanted to enter into evidence the driver”s blood test showing he had used cannabis before (or during) driving his route, but Virginia does not have a standard for this so the evidence was excluded. The driver was still convicted for his role in his co-worker’s death.
That accident was a matter of bad judgement. When the crossing gates started coming down the driver tried to snake his way between them and continue on his route. Typically, westbound trains on that line consist of 150+ empty coal cars coming back from Norfolk, and there is a grade coming out of Crozet that slows the trains down. They seem to take forever. The driver thought he could avoid a delay, but he drove his truck in front of a fast moving special train full of Republicans instead.
I think a few of the Republicans had to go to U.Va. hospital; the rest were loaded up on buses and driven on to the Greenbriar resort. Besides the truck crew member who was killed, another was badly injured.
Betty Cracker
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: LMAO!
NotMax
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
And we puffed it uphill. Both ways!
artem1s
@Kay: It’s Baldwin Wallace – likely polled a lot suburban Cleveland area White Catholic Democrats. They typically have family members in unions and/or went to or sent their kids to Catholic parochial schools. They believe their reproductive rights will be safe and it’s ‘those’ people who need to be kept from murdering baybees. Lots of cognitive dissonance around contraception, original sin and women’s rights.
Eyeroller
@kalakal: NotMax was assuming you meant the US Social Security system. During Ronnie’s reign, they hiked SS taxes and increased the retirement age because of all us Boomers who would surely break the system 40 years later. (The “lockbox” idea for which Al Gore was ridiculed.) My full retirement age is 66.5.
WereBear
@Yarrow: I’ve been following the program in the book Toxic Superfoods. Six months in and loving it!
She referenced thiamine in her chapter on vital supplements, but I still haven’t found further instructions anywhere else. One of the problems is that if you don’t have a specific diagnosis like IBS or Parkinson’s (which starts with thiamine IVs!) it doesn’t get considered as a treatment. While it’s vital for everyone with fatigue. So it’s all patchy out there.
Dr. Terry Wahls, MS researcher (who used to be in a wheelchair) says “autoimmune is all one disease.” I completely agree. But if I research my disease and thiamine, I only find something they did on rats.
But if it’s all one disease, maybe an official protocol doesn’t matter. (I didn’t let it stop me.) And I have had good luck with vitamin supplementation combined with foods which also have it. The “matrix” of real food helps absorption of all vitamins.
I can say the book is a vital companion for anyone trying an elimination diet for autoimmune. That turned out to be my path to success. (Ten years in and still no drugs.)
Which is how I am using it after my carnivore experiment went so well. (Stopped the worse flare of my life dead in its tracks.) The book will lets anyone refine their food additions in a way which would have kept me out of trouble adding new foods.
Since there is no protocol, I just started taking what the benfothiamine label said, (fat-enhanced thiamine is my BIG recc) and worked my way up to more. No known toxic dose. :)
Didn’t help that in the middle of the six months we had two months of mayhem… but them again I managed it without as much suffering as I would have. Proof of concept, ya ask me.
Kay
@WereBear:
I think there should be more research on chronic use of high potency weed and the effects on health over years, with special attention to very young users. Tobacco is a plant too and no one blows off nicotine as inconsequential or not worthy of study. They brag that they don’t drink anymore and instead smoke pot. They’re all convinced it’s completely harmless with no long term consequences, even if they’re using daily for years. None of them think that about booze or tobacco. They all know booze and tobacco are not good for their health. They were SOLD this idea that it’s “harmless”. I don’t know if it’s harmless and neither do they.
Also- the number of wingnut pot lobbyists is to me a yellow warning flag :)
They have bad ideas.
Eyeroller
@Geminid: It wasn’t funny because of the injuries and death, but I was still struck by the metaphor of a literal train wreck of a train full of Republicans hitting a garbage truck, scattering trash and debris everywhere.
Kay
@artem1s:
I think lowtechcyclist is right- the numbers cannot come out to a 58% average, so the 59% of Democrats has to be a typo. It should be higher and it probably is higher or the math of the poll doesn’t work.
oldgold
Economies are made up of capital and labor.
Why does labor have to foot 100% of the bill for Social Security and Medicare? Interest, dividends and capital transactions contribute nothing.
Some have suggested a very small tax on bond and stock transfers to shore up these vital programs.
RevRick
@Kay: You’re right. That poll doesn’t add up. If you assume roughly 1/3 splits between GOP, Dems, and Indies, to get 58%, you’d need something like 89% among Democrats to come up with that average.
WereBear
Wingnut pot lobbyists? Yeah, that would suppress my Democratic turnout. Very sus.
It was entirely different here, attitude-wise. I can assure you my local wingnuts are still pure and undistilled by any trace of libertarianism on that subject. :)
And yes, it’s the marketing. When I can’t think I watch Youtube. (Naturally.) And I’m still strong enough to withstand the constant bizarre commercials. Apparently more than average, anyway.
Freudian-informed advertising is only about 123 years old. It needs more regulation, too. Now we know why there’s so many false claims, never regulated.
Because Republicans have been defunding the FCC, FDA, etc. Con Artist Heaven, it is.
narya
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Hah! Yes. I stopped in the late 70s/early 80s, because I had more than one experience where a very small amount of pot made me waaaaaaaay too high. It’s possible there were additives or something, but it happened more than once, and it was so unpleasant that I just stopped taking the chance. I’ll probably try some gummies at some point, but . . . honestly, one of the things I like about alcohol is that you can modulate your intake, based on ABV. After my beer runs, I nearly always look for the lowest ABV on tap, whereas at the end of an evening at home, we might split a high-ABV “dessert” beer. We also have friends that we can do vertical tastings with, which is another way to taste a lot of high-ABV stuff w/o drinking a stupid amount.
WereBear
@Cheryl from Maryland: That’s what is going on in NY. Also, Tribal Lands are adding it to the booze and cigs lineup.
WereBear
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: LOL!
We didn’t have fancy glass pipes! We made ours from aluminum foil and liked it!
Kay
The pot referendum in Ohio is an “initiated statute” which means it’s an ordinary law rather than a constiutional amendment. A constitutional amendment can only be reversed with another constiutional amendment where an initiated statute can be reversed at any time by the legislature.
So that’s bizarre. Why would they go to all this trouble to pass a referendum the leg can overturn as soon as it passes? It makes me suspicious, like it’s the ultra clever manuevering of lawyer-lobbyists, like Republicans in the legislature WANT it to pass but they don’t want their fingerprints on it.
Geminid
@Eyeroller: If Republican Representatives bonded over this traumatic event, the effects have clearly worn off.
M31
trash and debris, and that’s just the Republicans
Percysowner
@Mousebumples: I’m hoping for a wide margin Yes, but with the misleading ballot language and all the lies being told by the RTL side, I’ll settle for any kind of Yes. I’m going to be tense until after the vote is counted.
WereBear
@oldgold: That is most excellent question for which the only answer is… Republicans!
Their party platform is “rules for thee, not me.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
Interesting Scientific American article calling into question the notion that pre-historic people divided into man the hunter and woman the gatherer. It also examines contemporary women’s performance in sports.
mrmoshpotato
Does this mean “Burning the GOP to the ground, and pissing on the ashes”?
Ken
But I hope not like we regulate the supplements industry, which is no regulation at all. Derek Lowe’s blog has the occasional article on this. Here’s an older one where 94% of the products tested didn’t contain what the label claimed.
Over the last decade, the FDA has been tightening up on this. By law, they still can’t control what goes in the bottle, but they can go after unfounded claims of medical benefits. Here’s a sample letter, where a single herbal supplement claimed to treat cancer, Parkinson’s, kidney stones, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, ear infections….
Princess
@Kay: It now reads 89% of Dems favouring yes. Must have been a typo.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax:
Was it tough to keep it lit in the two blizzards?
eclare
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
One example, from cats, the lionesses hunt for food, not the lions.
artem1s
3 and 5 year AMR’s may be having an effect. The cost of purchasing and rising interest rates are having a noticeable effect on how quickly houses are being scooped up by out of state buyers. The cash, site unseen offers are drying up. The buying companies are having trouble flipping and can’t draw enough rent to cover the rising interest rates on their AMR loans. It seems like they have been trying to dump some of their less profitable inventories too. At some point we’re going to see them start to walk away from the property tax and loan payments. We saw this pattern in Cleveland long before the 2008 housing crash. Buy sight unseen, mortgage to the hilt, sell at grossly inflated price to another buyer in their group, rinse repeat until the market dries up and/or they can’t generate any new cash thru refinancing. Once they are underwater they walk away with whatever cash they have and default on the loans, declare bankruptcy, and dissolve the buying company. Refile and go back and rebuy the same properties for pennies on the dollar from the banks and or city landbanks once the bubble has burst.
I think the personal bankruptcies are the first sign that we are in another housing bubble and the crash is due in another 2-3 years. How bad depends on whether the GOP gets control of Congress and/or the WH and passes another economy killing tax break for the .01%.
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear: We used a foil cup in toilet paper rolls.
WereBear
@Kay: I agree with all your points, especially about underage use. Now we know their brains don’t gel until 25, I am looking back at my own parenting experiences with more parental feelings about sliding scales of responsibility.
Keeping kids in school for four more years, in a place where they can try out their wings with some support, might be the best thing we can do for every kid. It doesn’t have to be college. But it needs to be school.
For the social aspects, if nothing else. We shouldn’t rely on work being our only source of meeting people during these prime romantic years. But I digress…
Pot stores are already provided stats from growers — it’s a selling point. Treating it like alcohol and tobacco (and firearms as an addictive substance!) would be the responsible way to do that, so we should in all instances.
(Really, if ATFC became a thing, we might have a rock and rolling change at not working against ourselves constantly. But I dream.)
The one thing that still astonishes me is how the STATE a person lives in has become so incredibly important to their prospects, over their entire lives.
That didn’t used to be so.
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly:
I once used an apple. Or an aluminum can.
Kay
@Ken:
I go to a nurse practictioner for primary care and she rants about this. I have to take calcium and Vit D for osteoporosis and she was like “but you can’t trust the dose OTC!” – just furious. Love her.
TS
@OzarkHillbilly:
As young voters they probably voted to join the EU – so might as well go full circle & vote to leave
Geminid
@narya: A friend has gotten good at making cannabis edibles. She sells them at cost to her retired nursing friends. They’ve all got aches and pains and cannabis is a decent analgesic.
My friend is usually a careful and methodical gummy cook, but a couple weeks ago she was making a batch for her brother and slipoed up. The gum drops were four times as potent than usual. Her brother is undergoing treatment for cancer, so she sent the gum drops on with a heads-up.
She makes gummies using alcohol extraction. She also makes caramels using a butter extraction technique. Mmh, mmh!
Percysowner
@Kay: They tried to pass it as a Constitutional Amendment a few years back. A lot of newspapers got all in a tizzy about how this isn’t the type of thing that should be in a Constitution, although they agreed it was good legislation. So supporters had to go this route. It can be overturned by the legislature, but at least the argument can be made the the legislature is overturning the will of the people. This being Ohio, that doesn’t mean they won’t overturn the will of the people, but it gives supporters a reason to try the Constitutional Amendment route and the newspapers will have less to complain about.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
M31
@WereBear:
this article (sorry, it’s at Politico) has data that show that the poorest residents of New England (rural Maine) have better life expectancy than the richest residents of the deep South
NotMax
@eclare
Old enough to remember the McDonald’s cocaine spoons?
Kay
@WereBear:
Agree. I think higher income people do not consider this with lower income kids who are not college bound or don’t go to college. Going away to college is a nice interim step to adulthood. A controlled environment where kids are insulated from what might be poor decisions so they can get some age on them. Non college kids who go out on their own don’t have that- they’re thrust right into full adulthood. No wonder they get into more trouble.
My middle son did a 5 year electrician apprenticeship and a LOT of them drop off in that 5 years, because they also have to manage as adults in the world while they’re training.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: I used to be on my university’s IRB. There was a guy in sports medicine doing research on supplements. We made him test every supplement he used because the industry was so unregulated that there could have been anything in that bottle. Things may have changed, but it was an issue.
kalakal
@NotMax:
Thanks for clarifying that, your reply had me rather puzzled
@Eyeroller: And now his reply makes sense 😄
It seems govts on both side of the pond pulled this crap on us
Cheryl from Maryland
@Kay: Unfortunately, serious medical studies, especially though NIH etc., can’t happen until the federal government reclassifies marijuana from a Schedule 1 drug. Schedule 1 drugs are banned as too dangerous in most cases from medical research on humans. If allowed, only government supplied pot can be used – which is ditch weed and in short supply. Fortunately, President Biden called for cannabis to be rescheduled last year. It’s a lengthy process, involving the DEA and the FDA, but it is underway per an announcement by Secretary Beccaria, and the process does not involve the legislature. I want cannabis to be researched not only for potency and age, but if smoking it has similar issues to cigarettes. Another reason I support what Maryland has done, without regulation of growers, producers and stores, one doesn’t know what one’s getting.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WereBear: For some kids, the military serves the same purpose as college. They get training while away from home under some supervision.
Kay
@Percysowner:
Thanks- I knew it had failed prior. I thought maybe they did the statute route because there’s a lower bar to get it on the ballot.
The GOP leg isn’t going to overturn it though. It’s a big business:
Boehner signed on with one lobbying group and then started his own group. That’s why they’re all suing one another. They’re fighting for lobbyist dominance in the new industry. Boehner opposes regulation of the industry, so there’s a shocker.
eclare
@NotMax:
No…but I never tried cocaine.
OzarkHillbilly
@eclare: I remember aluminum cans being used and I have a vague recollection about apples but I think that was just something I heard about.
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly:
People without cars in college dorms can get creative!
rikyrah
@M31:
😂😂😂😂😂
NotMax
@NotMax
Which brings to mind a bit of dialogue from the musical The Drowsy Chaperone. Relying on memory:
“He was the All-Brite toothpaste man. All-Brite was extremely popular in the 1920s because it contained cocaine.
“Oh yes, it’s true. If you look at the label it’s the fifth ingredient down. Right after sugar.”
Princess
Yeesh that Ohio poll looks bad for Sherrod Brown. 44% favourability. Ugh.
eclare
@NotMax:
I saw a production of that here in Memphis. Very enjoyable!
NotMax
@eclare
Here ya go. Ostensibly coffee stiirrers.
frosty
@OzarkHillbilly: Was that for smoking the good shit?
eclare
@NotMax:
Ah, I remember those, didn’t know they were called cocaine spoons.
Juju
@Kay: in regard to teenagers, it’s the effects of pot on the still developing brain that should cause concern. Realistically, I don’t think pot use should be allowed until the brain is fully developed, which is 18-25 years of age, depending on gender. Female brains tend to mature faster than male brains. Chronic use of pot in teenagers is not a good idea, any more than chronic alcohol use is a good idea in teenagers. Tobacco is just bad in general. I don’t understand the smoking cigarettes thing, but my father was a hematologist/ oncologist and when he said any child of his who smoked would be kicked out of the house, he meant it. If I lived in Ohio I’d vote the way you did.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: If we weren’t omnivores, we wouldn’t have eaten on all the megafauna on the North American continent.
If women are athletic, they are eating meat, and carrots don’t run away. New research is about PROTEIN as the #1 factor in healthy aging.
Easter Island, with mastodons.
Bupalos
@Mousebumples: I’m actually pretty worried about confusion between august and nov issue 1. It’s going to cost a point or two at least I think. I’ve seen august no signs still up.
Scout211
Since this thread has now moved on to various interesting topics, I will add that one of the new laws that Governor Newsom just signed is requiring California elementary schools to teach cursive in elementary school. California now joins 17 other states with this requirement.
Supporters of the bill cite the need for this because there are so many historical documents and writings that are written in cursive. Plus, there is some new research that found that reading and writing in cursive stimulates a different part of the brain (than printing/typing does), much like dual language learning does.
ETA for clarity.
artem1s
I’m no on Issue 2 as well. There is ample evidence that pot is addictive if you start before/during your teens (just like tobacco). And research shows it has significant effect on ability to complete an education and get jobs that require master or professional degrees. We won’t know the long term health problems for another 20-30 years, but we’re probably headed for another spike in lung cancer, COPD, and other heart and respiratory diseases and deaths for those who have been smoking and/or vaping habitually for a couple of decades. Oxy and meth was bad but pot is going to be tobacco bad.
My personal observation is that pot addicts react the same way as alcoholics and smokers do when they are confronted with limits on their usage. They claim they can function on the job and drive perfectly fine even when they are stoned. That they have the right to impose their addiction to everyone around them. They tend to believe self medication is the only way they can manage pain, or ADHD or whatever. They can’t go without their drug of choice for extended periods (if you can’t refrain for a week – you are an addict). So they avoid applying for jobs that require piss tests. And because of their denial, they tend to pass their addictions on to their kids along with all the health problems and poverty that goes with them.
I agree the sellers and growers need to be licensed and the dosage to be standardized and packaging needs to follow FDA standards so consumers know what they are buying. Lawsuits are going to happen – there is no way we should have to go thru bullshit limiting civil suits that we went thru with big tobacco and the NRA. If you want to sell a product that is killing your customers you should have to pay. But pot is going to be big money so there is incentive and pressure to legalize and then work out the problems later.
NotMax
@eclare
Early method of recycling.
:)
Geminid
@Cheryl from Maryland: I want to see cannabis researched for its potential medical use. I am intrigued by the beneficial effect the “Charlotte’s Web” strain has on a severe form of childhood epilepsy. Testimony by parents induced the stodgy Virginia legislature to legalize this limited medical use years ago.
That was anecdotal evidence of course, but I think the possibilities of treatments for other neurologic maladies should be explored in a scientific way.
NotMax
@Scout211
“California elementary schools teaching children to curse? The horror!”
//
Juju
@Kay: Check out NOVA and Frontline episodes that have information about the teenage brain and specific NOVA episodes devoted to cannabis and the teenage brain.
artem1s
@Princess: Again, it’s a Baldwin Wallace poll. White, affluent, Berners, Green, Kucinich, Libertarian and Occupy 20-30 year olds. They are a plague on the state democratic party. They forever whinge about Sherrod being a corporate shill just like Hillary – he knows how to bring big money into the state and supports industry. He doesn’t ignore that part of his constituency that is reliant on manufacturing and wall street jobs. He raises a lot of money so he’s the enemy – he refuses to engage in performance outrage against big donors like St Bernard and Dennis the Menace do.
Yarrow
@WereBear: Thank you. I have not heard of that book but skimming it see it’s about oxalates. I’ve definitely seen discussion of those as a problem, including a very closed Yahoo group run by someone who apparently ran a strict site. I think Yahoo groups shut down awhile ago so am not sure what happened to them.
Betty Cracker
@Scout211: Interesting. I’m not sure I buy either rationale for reimposing a requirement for kids to learn to read and write in cursive. People who study historical documents need special skills anyway (e.g., a familiarity with period linguistics), not just the ability to decipher cursive, so it seems more practical to add the study of cursive to their required skillset rather than make everyone learn cursive when the vast majority won’t need it. If cursive stimulates different parts of the brain like learning a second language does, go with beefing up second language requirements — seems like a second language would be far more useful than learning two different ways of reading and writing English.
WereBear
@Scout211: So long as it’s not part of the GPA.
Ken
I think the Democrats need to come up with something different than what the Republicans are already doing.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Light years easier to imprint them with cursive when they’re young’uns and the little brains are more plastic. Grading penmanship, however, is better left in the past.
Also too, how to read analog clocks.
NotMax
@NotMax
Plastic = elastic.
Silly old me.
OzarkHillbilly
@frosty: The good shit, the bad shit, and all the shit in between.
Juju
@M31: I believe that. So much of the southern diet is deep fried food, bacon, mayonnaise or a lot of sugar in or on things.
WereBear
@Yarrow: I had no idea! I mean, I ran across oxalates a year ago since I was re-introducing certain vegetables, but was assured my high dairy consumption meant it was no problem!
In the 1840’s, they already knew that was wrong. We seem to have forgotten something, which is now of vital importance.
Another Scott
@artem1s: Maryland’s approach is probably best.
Virginia has decriminalized it, and done other things, but it’s not legal for recreational use yet. There’s a big fancy pot store that I see on the way to work, but only people with a medical card can use it at the moment.
They want to be ready the instant it’s legal for adults (which is coming).
I think there are (at least) 3 main issues:
1) Rationalizing the federal (and state/local) drug laws. Pot should not be on Schedule 1. What do we do about drug testing and slow flushing of metabolites from the body? Someone having a gummy on a Friday night shouldn’t get them fired if they have a “random” drug test Wednesday morning. These businesses have to move into the real economy (banking, etc.) or they’re going to continue to be hinky and hard to regulate.
2) As many say, regulating it for potency, truth-in-labeling, dosage, etc. We know (from press reports, anyway) too many people are dying of fentanyl poisoning and we don’t want cheap pot with crocodil and fentanyl and bath salts and who knows what else being sold as “herbal” and “safe” and all the rest.
3) Figuring out what to do about the issues with youngsters breaking their brains with it. Stoners are real. Pot isn’t benign – it can be abused.
My recollection is that the earlier Ohio voter referendum would have set up 10 (?) regional monopolies and there were good reasons to be against it. I’m generally against putting things like this in a state constitution, but at least in Virginia’s case just about all the state laws have to be there. It’s so stupid…
Presumably whatever happens, the laws will have to be tweaked once it’s off Schedule 1. Here’s hoping that the companies are not so powerful by that time that they lord over the legislatures…
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Scout211:
I always thought note writing (in cursive) helped me remember. I’m personally convinced of this, so much so I still use a legal pad and pen to interview people and take notes in hearings. I can SEE the notes when I need to recall, like, the placement of the note on the page, the line breaks, etc.
I was accused of cheating by a college physics instructor because my force diagrams were identical to those in the textbook. Also he was a sexist and didn’t think girls could do well in physics. FYI :)
I took notes (by hand) during lectures and studied them I could see my notes in my head when I drew the diagram on the exam. I just had contempt for him by the end of the course. What a jerk.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: The shortest book I ever read was an analog clock.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: True, but the plastic brain phase is short, there is so much to learn and lesson time is finite. I’m not convinced cursive is a good use of that time.
Scout211
@Betty Cracker: You make some valid points. One of the bill’s sponsors, when citing the historical documents, mentioned 23andMe and looking up family history. She is correct in that many of those documents are written in cursive. So it does affect the average person somewhat.
IMHO, the current focus on electronic communication is changing the way we communicate as a culture, even slowly changing our grammar and word meanings. Of course this is a common thread throughout history, but I do think it’s good to retain older forms of communication even as the newer forms take over.
narya
@Kay: I vaguely remember seeing recently that taking notes by hand is better (for recall) than typing, and that’s certainly my own experience. I can add arrows and stars and such, on the fly, and make connections, and I swear to you that I just remember better. My younger nephew is taking written notes on an iPad, which sounds like it would be useful–he certainly finds it helpful for filing and sorting. I also think that taking notes requires you to start organizing your thoughts around the subject much more than just trying to type quickly and capture everything verbatim. You can’t write as fast as you can type, so the processing required for writing is a memory aid, at least for me.
OzarkHillbilly
@Scout211: I see a new business in the reading of cursive opening up.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Firesign Theater always in season.
“Howdy, Lt. Baha’ined. What’s up?”
“We ain’t. Got any loco weed?”
“Sure. Got some Road Apple Red right here.”
WereBear
@Kay: The irony is that one should be able to grow their own ditchweed, just like in the old days :)
Scout211
@Betty Cracker: FYI, here are the other 17 states that require schools to teach cursive. Florida is on the list.
Betty Cracker
@Scout211: Good point about old family documents and also about how electronic communication is affecting usage. I suspect there is probably already an app that can translate cursive for people who didn’t grow up writing it — if not, there should be!
I had to learn cursive in school, but I never use it. (I take notes in print fast.) My kid didn’t have to learn cursive in school, and I remember other parents grousing about that. I didn’t have a problem with the change because I personally find cursive useless, but that’s not always the best rationale either. ;-)
ETA: They must have reinstated teaching cursive in FL; our kid (class of 2016) definitely did not have to learn it.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: +1
Learning anything different helps the brain. (Like Kay, I take written notes because the more ways of getting the information into my brain, the more I remember and the better I am at processing it.)
My mom knew shorthand. I don’t think we are doomed because it’s (AFAIK) not taught anymore.
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@NotMax:
According to Madison Cawthorne they use keys now. Much greener, no plastic!
Alison Rose
I love when Dark Brandon gets sarcastic. He does it in a way that makes it seem like light-hearted teasing, yet it still digs the knife in.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
So old that was drilled in distinct hand motions to write a final “r’ and final “t” in cursive.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
Excellent point. How I wish I would have taken Spanish in high school. I took Latin…
Geminid
@narya: I like taking notes with a four-color pen, on quarter-inch graph paper. Those pens are available at Krogers, so I guess schoolkids still use them.
Some graph paper and a four-color pen can come in handy when designing woodworking and landscape construction projects.
Frankensteinbeck
Deleted. I feel like I’ve said it before and I’m trying to repeat myself less these days.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
Nominated.
mrmoshpotato
@Scout211: Bart Simpson: Well, I know “Hell” “Damn”…
different-church-lady
Sometimes I write in cursive in my journal in public and people treat me like I have a superpower.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Same here.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Stretchy young brains!
WereBear
@Kay: There’s studies that show writing notes on paper aids retention. Especially if no one else needs to read them.
Turns out I had dyspraxia and those C’s in cursive class were the best I could do.
Curse you, Zaner-Bloser Elementary! I rot you filthy!
wjca
Or maybe it’s as simple as nostalgia for their youth, when everything was wonderful. Just like the boomers here, who want to take the country back to the (imaginary) 1950s.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: And in a country which had every European power trying to establish a foothold and then an almost 100+ year history of being subjugated by one of those powers, the disconnect is multiplied. I am speaking of India of course.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Decent garage band name.
kalakal
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Luxury!
When I was a young chap back in dear old Blighty hash was the usual form of consumption. Leaves etc were rarely seen
different-church-lady
FRIEND, LAST YEAR: “ My brother-in-law brought some THC drops to the house. We made pot brownies and we all thought we were all acid!”
ME, AUGUST: I let someone talk me into trying a gummy, and I ended up spending the whole night thinking I was on acid and vomiting.
CO-WORKER LAST WEEK: “About a month ago I tried a gummy and I thought I was on acid!”
But everything’s fine as long as there’s an industry group making it legit
Honus
@Eyeroller: that was my garbage truck. I also used to regularly ride that train from Charlottesville to Charleston WV for work. The Amtrak trains are a lot faster through that crossing than the freight trains. I think the driver thought he could make it through and then the gate trapped him. I remember thinking at the time “damn. the republicans killed my garbage man”
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: But a horrible basement band name?
Did anyone rock out in the attic?
WereBear
@different-church-lady: Youth and Fools do need the guard rails.
We have archaic thoughts rolling around in the populace partly because marketing was allowed to run rampant under Republican rule.
From dozens of spam calls a day to absolute lying about health claims to sell products, to the point where it was the new normal. I’ve met young people who don’t know it’s illegal.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
I see you’ve been busy! I, on the other hand, am a lazy bum this morning, just now gearing up.
different-church-lady
@WereBear: But my point is this is the legal stuff!
Scout211
I don’t know about an app, but Ancestry and 23andMe use something like that to translate cursive documents into text. And what we found (on both sites) is that those translations are often incorrect. We could see the cursive words and the text translations at the same time and there were many mistakes. Names, dates and locations were not always accurate. So knowing how to read the original cursive was a benefit to us. Although, some of the older documents were written with such dramatic flourish that we had a tough time deciphering the cursive writing. LOL
Villago Delenda Est
@bbleh:
There is an alternative treatment. See the first editorial cartoon of the thread.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
I always hated writing in cursive. Mine is illegible under the best of circumstances, even to me (if I’m looking at a note I scribbled in a hearing two years ago, it’s meaningless), and I print faster anyway.
If they really want to do kids a favor, they’d teach shorthand in the 5th-6th grades. THAT shit is useful.
And no, I’m not in the “oh, you gotta know cursive to read older documents” camp. That’s all about Declaration/Constitution fetishists, and they’re far more sensible to read when printed, without those stupid “f”=“s” visual speedbumps. Everything else in history is translated out (and no, Shakespeare in cursive is not a thing that renders more meaning to the reader).
sab
@Kay: When I was in accounting school our much revered auditing professor tried to forbid me from taking notes. He thought it would impair my concentration for listening. Since I had no intention of ever being an auditor (I do tax) I had to go stomping off to the dean to complain that I was not going to waste tuition money on a course where I couldn’t take notes. The dean had a talk with him.
I have despised auditors ever since. I only took the course so that I could pass the CPA exam.
I take notes on everything so that I can read it later in case I forgot something.
Geminid
@different-church-lady: There is definitely a portion of the populace that finds being stoned an unpleasant experience. I also hear stories of people who liked weed for decades, but then one day they started having anxiety attacks and stayed away from cannabis after that.
They’re not missing too much. There are THC-free strains that give many of the benefits without the mental and emotional effects.
But anybody trying edibles should definitely start out with a very small helping because it’s a very different experience and, as others point out, there is some very potent weed out there. Someone would choke on this stuff if they smoked it, but it goes down easily in a tasty edible. And then….
Honus
@NotMax:
Bayer heroin for children:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bayer_Heroin_bottle.jpg![]()
sab
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Shakespeare didn’t write in cursive. They used a whole different, older alphabet system that you have to learn if you want to read the really old documents. So this transition isn’t new. It’s just new to us.
Villago Delenda Est
@narya: I had a professor in college who provided an outline, on a chalkboard, for every lecture. This helped organize notes very well, and I retained the information much better. The Army uses this method as well for lesson plans. It just makes sense to me.
WereBear
@different-church-lady: And I’m hoping they won’t do it again :)
It’s my understanding edibles can be difficult to blend if someone is in a hurry. I was told they eat a corner while cleaning up for the party. Makes the cleaning easier and gives you a sense of the product.
It behooves a good hostess.
wjca
Have you considered that your signature is (very probably) cursive?
Juju
@Betty Cracker: Did a cursive scare you when you were a child?
When I learned about the language acquiring stage of childhood, I realized that the way we teach foreign languages is ridiculous. Foreign language education should start in the single digits, not at age 12 or 13. There truly seems to be a time limit in quickness of learning and fluency in learning a foreign language. The fact that I took French on and off from the 7th grade through college and can say hello, goodbye and ask where the bathroom is, is indicative that the old theory of foreign language education is not particularly useful . I don’t really see a problem with teaching cursive writing, I believe it’s generally taught somewhere during the third and fifth grades. Cursive is based on something the child already knows, the alphabet, and it’s not a difficult thing to teach or learn. If you get into penmanship, that is a different matter. The human brain is capable of learning after the plastic phase. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s the end of the world if cursive isn’t taught. I’m a former teacher and in my career I came across a few students who didn’t know how to write in cursive. One of those students asked about it because she wanted to be able to sign her name the way I did on a hall pass. I wrote the cursive alphabet for her and showed her how to connect the letters. She learned to sign her name in a matter of minutes, and she went on from there. I do think signatures should be in cursive because cursive makes a more distinct signature than printing, but that could just be me.
Alison Rose
@wjca: But for most of us, that’s literally the only time we write anything in cursive, and part of the reason for it is to make a signature unique. Plus…it’s not even real cursive. If you didn’t know my name and looked at my signature, you’d never figure out what it is. It’s basically an A and a squiggle, a sort-of R, and a P and a squiggle. Most signatures aren’t exactly “cursive” so much as “cursive-adjacent scrawls decipherable only to the author”.
Ken
“I think this is 16th-century secretary hand. You’ll need to speak to Miss Terrant, she’s our only specialist in that.”
Fortunately the three or four cursive styles the U.S. has used in the last two and a half centuries are fairly similar — though I find the oldest, such as in the Declaration of Independence, very difficult. (EDIT: Reading the more recent comments, I see I’m not alone.)
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodingers_cat:
Absolutely. One thing I learned is that conservative cultural waves actively destroyed records that did not match what they wanted history to be like. Men in Victorian England or 1950s America really did not want anyone to know how hard their grandmothers partied. When Catholic clergy wrote down non-Christian religion they learned, they tweaked it to imply that everyone knew there was really one true God.
The axes taken to South Asia’s history must have been enormous. Ugh.
lowtechcyclist
@Scout211:
Fuck cursive. Talk about something that was named appropriately.
“there are so many historical documents and writings that are written in cursive.” That’s nice, people who need to decipher the originals can learn to read cursive. And just like with any advanced intellectual discipline, the rest of us don’t need to master arcane skills to read about the results and benefit from the knowledge gained by the specialists in the field.
And there are no other, more worthwhile, ways to stimulate that part of the brain? Only cursive has that knack? I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that in the least.
Nobody – absolutely nobody – needs to learn how to write cursive in elementary school. Period. It’s even going the way of the buggy whip with respect to signatures on checks or legal documents, which is the one thing that I have used it for in the past five decades.
And speaking as a lefthander, double fuck cursive. It teaches you to write in a way that leaves you smearing what you just wrote, forever and ever.
wjca
And then there are those of us who are just flat out allergic. Even 2nd hand pot smoke, even faint enough that you can’t smell it — if it’s there, it feels like two knitting needles being driven into my skull. Which was a real pest in college, where there was a lot of it being smoked.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@wjca:
The beauty is that your signature – even printed – is still your signature, and if need be can be forensically examined for comparison.
Cursive just doesn’t matter legally.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck:
That has distorted the way Indians/South Asians view themselves as well. One of the biggest reasons why BJP is so popular with the haves in India is because it tells them the myths about themselves that they want to hear
It is a toxic mixture of selective reading of history to suit your narrative. It is not always outright lies but a mix of lies and half truths so it is difficult to debunk.
Geminid
@Honus: This train was a special charter, just for that retreat. There was a locomotive at each end, so it wouldn’t have to turn around at the Greenbriar.
A friend and I watched coverage on Channel 29,, and they kept showing a helicopter view of the scene. We did not know about the second engine, so we spent a couple hours carefully reconstructing the accident without knowing we were looking at the back end of the train, not the front..
wjca
True. But how do you get to that (repeatable) scrawl without initially knowing cursive? Sure, by our age it’s degenerated. But it started out, at least for me, quite legible.
M31
@Geminid:
there is a metaphor in there somewhere about Republicans not knowing their ass end from their front end
Juju
@Alison Rose: You do a Nixon like signature? If you want to look at something interesting Google the evolution of Richard Nixon’s signature.
schrodingers_cat
I learned cursive, print and Devnagari all before I was 8, and I wish I had learned the Modi (the d is a hard d like drum not the soft one as the PM last name) script which the cursive version of Devnagari. Many historical documents in the Modi script remain unread because fewer and fewer people can read it.
prostratedragon
Russian oligarch claims to be the man behind the purchase of
the Hand of GloryForbes Global, the face of which deal is a young American tech company founder.Honus
@Geminid: i started making edibles again about twenty five years ago. (I stopped smoking pot a couple years after college (1978) because I didn’t like it anymore) A relative had cancer and I figured he’d need some to help with chemo so I looked an old dealer friend, got some hash, and made some beautiful brownies. Since then, several more friends have had use for edibles for the same and various other reasons, so I have been making chocolate fudge and giving it away for the past twenty years or so. Don’t use it myself but people seem to like it.
evodevo
@There go two miscreants: Barry’s been one of my go-to guys, ever since the Bush Recession. His book outlining the causes of that debacle was cogent and non-partisan. I made one of my anti-Obama winger acquaintances read it before I would even discuss the situation. He had to admit it made sense, and he even shut up about the whole thing and quit throwing nutjob emails at me… Amazing…
Karen S.
@different-church-lady: I write in cursive in my journal, too. My wife is convinced I do that so no one will be able to read it (now and) in the future. Haha. No. I just like it. A couple of years ago, I wrote a note to one of my late mother’s caregivers, in cursive, of course. The caregiver was in her early 20s and she admitted that she had a hard time reading it. It never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t be able to read cursive.
I read somewhere a while ago that learning and writing cursive, particularly when young, helps develop fine motor skills.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist: Show us on the doll where cursive touched you.
Villago Delenda Est
@wjca: My mother’s signature was fully legible her entire life. Me, not so much.
different-church-lady
@Karen S.:
I suppose if one is to deploy cursive into the 21st century world, it is incumbent to make it neat, legible cursive.
schrodingers_cat
In India cursive is called the running hand. And it makes it easy to write faster if you are well versed in it.
My handwriting is a hybrid of print and cursive. FWIW.
Villago Delenda Est
@There go two miscreants: To give a real world example: when I was stationed in Seoul, student protests were a big thing. US networks would focus on riot police clashing with students. My parents worried about me. But on the ground, if you went one block away from the altercation, everything was calm, just normal day to day activity. The students and the police waited for the TV cameras to show up before they started clashing. We saw this in Iraq, too, as closeup crowds tearing down Saddam statues were, upon zooming back, revealed to be about 30 people in a mostly empty plaza. That was indeed an excellent read. Local news: if it bleeds, it leads, even if crime is actually falling.
Alison Rose
@wjca: Right, but I guess I just don’t see any other time when cursive is necessary. Think about it — the vast majority of communication you do that’s not verbal is typed, yeah? Emails, texts, FB posts, comments, etc. We don’t hand write much of our communications with others anymore, and when we do, it’s usually just a note in a birthday card or a reminder on a Post-It or something. I can see teaching kids how to form cursive letters so that they can have a signature, but beyond that, I just don’t see the point.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Scout211: Library of Congress has a crowd source transcription project, with a whole bunch of documents that can’t be read by machine. Some are cursive, some are in other languages, many have marginalia that need to be dealt with.
The humans still rule!
Betty Cracker
@Juju: Nope, it didn’t scare me. I easily learned to write in cursive as a child and probably still could produce a draft or letter in cursive if I had to. I just prefer printing, which is generally more legible, and I question the utility of teaching kids two separate ways of reading and writing the same language.
Ruckus
@bbleh:
Who do those media people work for? The poor, the tired, the labor? Or is it the people that make money off the poor, the tired, the labor? It’s those that own the media, who publicize day to day life of the “important people,” and the “pitfalls” of a lot of money and fame, like having too much of both. I mean those people are the ones that make the world go round, not the millions of people who work for them, doing those day to day things that actually make the money and profit, like write the stories in the papers and on and on and on, the truck drivers who deliver the food to the stores or the clerk that sells them their food or the cop who gives them the ticket in their $90,000 car or anyone of the millions of people who build those cars or the tires or the gasoline or on and on and on and on.
We are all a part of this economy and this country. The rich, the middle, the poor, the retired. I don’t pull my own weight any longer, I’m retired, after 60 yrs of working. Yes I started young – or did I? A paper route at 11-12 yrs old and jobs or businesses till I called it quits. How many others do/did the same? Millions upon millions of us do this every day and make money for the millionaires/billionaires to get richer and richer. And in a country that says that we are all equal. We are in the eyes of this country, sort of. Are we though? I see people living on the street here in LA county, we now provide them tents so they aren’t as obvious and can get out of the sun and rain. Mostly people of color. We have homes and cars and food and they have what – a tent? This is equality? Is it really much different anywhere else in this country? We have people like SFB/TFG and people living on the street. We run the entire gamut of humanity in this country and some make millions (or more) from the interest on their bank accounts and the sweat of their employees and others have tents on sidewalks for homes.
It’s not exactly the same from top to bottom is it?
different-church-lady
@Alison Rose:
All I’m gonna say is I can touch-type, I can write in cursive and print, and do calligraphy, and I’m glad for all of them.
different-church-lady
@Ruckus: Preach!
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Same. Although my calligraphy skills are quite rudimentary
What type of calligraphy do you do.
Ken
@Betty Cracker: Same here. My printing is half-cursive though, with letters joined in places. I sometimes look at it and think “how do I move my hand for that”, but of course if I pay attention it doesn’t come out the same.
On checks, I block-print small caps for everything including the memo line, with my signature the only cursive. My signature, like Alison Rose‘s, is barely legible as my initials with a squiggle following each. It is almost comic when I have to sign legal documents with the full “Kenneth”. There’s the habitual K-squiggle, then “neth” in careful sixth-grade cursive.
opiejeanne
@Scout211: I have a letter written by my great great grandfather to 3 of his sons who had moved to Chicago in 1863. His handwriting is beautiful, but nearly impenetrable. He lived in Canada,Toronto area, most of his life but came there from Ireland some time before 1832, when he is listed in a Canadian document and I think his education was mainly in Ireland.
It took me nearly a month to transcribe that letter so that it could be read, and the difficulty was added to by the interesting spellings of the same word. It was a fiery letter on the first page, about what should be done to the Confederates by the Union, and the rest implores my great grandfather to go to church (as if) and take his brothers (even more as if), gossip about who was getting married and to whom, who had gone to the gold fields to seek a fortune, and ends with the local farm report: cows is up, corn and piggies is down, how much a bushel of wheat is selling for.
Another Scott
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s here in the USA, also too.
I remember going to a vigil at the SCOTUS around 20 years ago on the RvW anniversary. There were maybe 20 people there, including the TV press. We talked (off the record) with a young reporter who was there. We were marching in a circle, “we won’t go back, we will fight back”, etc., and everything was fine, then some RWNJ started an altercation and INSTANTLY the video cameras and reporters were there rushing in to get closeups and audio. I mean INSTANTLY.
It’s clear what they are told and trained to cover.
And it reinforced my view that video (and stills) always lie. One has to be very careful about the way the press covers just about anything.
Cheers,
Scott.
Alison Rose
On the cursive subject, my mom’s signature is pretty legible, but what’s odd about her writing is that her cursive slants backwards. She’s right-handed, and I asked her if she was one of those kids who should have been left-handed but was forced not to be and she said no. Her handwriting has just always slanted backwards rather than forwards like most. Which meant that in school, it was impossible for me to forge her dang signature when I got a bad grade on a test, LOL. Thankfully, Dad’s was much easier to do. (I only did it twice!)
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
–Newsy McNewsdirector
dnfree
@lowtechcyclist: As a fellow left-hander, I agree about cursive. In the 1950s we used fountain pens, and the side of my hand was always blue.
My husband is also left-handed, and the nuns allowed him to write with his left hand, but made him tilt his paper the same direction as the other kids. He’s one of those who hooks his hand so he’s writing above the output. Painful and slow.
My mother had a handwriting award from the 1920s, sixth grade, that was bigger than any college diploma I ever saw. We used to get a separate grade in handwriting. It was a huge deal. I’m glad to see it dying out.
Dorothy A. Winsor
If schools had infinite time, I’d say sure, teach cursive. Small benefit, but whatever. But schools don’t have infinite time. There are more important things to learn.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Dorothy A. Winsor: music.
Alison Rose
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Schools really like teaching things with moderate-to-nil practical use, and NOT teaching things kids could really use. Like…no one ever taught us anything about taxes and budgeting and shit, and yet we spent weeks on quadratic equations.
Ask me how many times in my life, post-Algebra II, I’ve needed to solve a quadratic equation.
The answer is none. None times.
Glidwrith
@Ken: A supplement company can also as the FDA to test and certify their product. It is expensive, but I will now only buy supplements that have that certification.
Ruckus
@eclare:
Boomers – and yes I am one, are simply people born at a time (1946-1964) when a lot of men came home from WWII and our economy was doing well and everyone wanted to go back to a more normal life. Of course a lot of people weren’t included in the rise in prosperity because of racism, but the rich (and a good part of the middle) did prosper, so for some, all was good. We’ve done better as a country but have we done good enough? I was taught that this country is based upon equality of being but I’m still having a bit of a problem seeing this from top to bottom, of it actually being true. Skin color and heritage are still with us as measure of human value, of opportunity, of reasonable life. We will never change everyone’s mind but we should and have to do better. We’ve elected a black man to president, we have a black woman as VP but we also still have, and always will, all the faults of humanity. Can we fix this, or at least make it not so much a part of us? Can we do better? I think we have to.
Juju
@Betty Cracker: My printing is also more neat than my cursive, but when I do note taking I tend to use a combination of cursive and printing. The combination of the two seems to be faster for me. My sister is left handed and she always hated cursive writing, and she learned using liquid ink cartridge pens, so it was usually a smeared mess for her. My parents learned cursive in the days of enforced perfect penmanship and they both had/ have beautiful writing. Their children do not have beautiful penmanship. Mine often looks like a chicken ran across the paper. I never looked at as learning the same thing different ways. It was what was required and I did it, but I guess that is what it was. People tend to adapt, so I’m not terribly worried about it one way or the other. The cursive scaring you question was just a joke. I didn’t mean to offend you if I did.
scav
CaseyL
Not teaching cursive is a mistake because a lot of people still use it, and if you haven’t been trained on what cursive looks like, it can be hard to read. Most letters may look much the same printed or scripted, but some don’t (r, s, h, chiefly).
Bill Bryson’s book “Shakespeare: The World As Stage” talks about the variants in how letters were written in 16th Century England, and the difficulties that poses for researches reading original texts from that time. There were, for example, five different ways to write a lowercase “d.” I see the elimination of cursive another step along the path to establishing a global standard written alphabet, which is laudable, but not if it means being unable to read even recent handwriting which happens to be cursive.
Baud
I write in cursive so young people won’t know what I’m saying.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Baud… they already don’t know what we’re saying.
Juju
@Ruckus: When I was born I was gen x, but they changed the years and now I’m classified as boomer. I’ve never felt like a boomer, nor did I actually get any of the nice benefits that earlier boomers received. The benefits of boomerness started to be stripped away during Regan. I resent that, and all things considered, would prefer to be considered gen x.
Geminid
@Alison Rose: I used to use the quadratic formula in construction layout. More recently, I used it to figure out how to lay out an elliptical retaining wall. Once I figured out the trick, it was easy as pi.
Another Scott
@CaseyL: I remember changing schools in 3rd grade and being behind when they had learned cursive and I hadn’t. I cried to my mom and she (a lefty) taught me.
2 = Q is still a mistake that they should have rectified.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat:
Mine too. The faster I write the more cursive.
Mai Naem mobile
different-church-lady
@Juju: The idea that the boom extends all the way to the mid sixties is bullshit.
kalakal
@Baud: They’ll know it’s about pants, or lack thereof
Eunicecycle
I just realized that I have been cursive writing my Postcards to Voters. Maybe young people won’t be able to read them! Ugh!
scav
A lot of things we learn are often not exactly only about what they are themselves. They may be just building blocks to something else, or stages / platforms upon which later things will be erected. Or, they can be grinding into us the process of how to learn, how to identify dissect, organize and solve (as best we can with the available materials) a problem. I remember trying to get this across to college students when TAing a GenEd Geography class. I’m trying to get across a basic skill using geographic examples. I would also be thrilled if they left with at least a general appreciation of how geography influences things, but memorizing the Von Thünen model of optimal location isn’t the point.
kalakal
@Mai Naem mobile:
Same here, the very smooth flowing roller tip? pens help me as well as fountain pens ( obvs). My writing with a ball point is appalling
different-church-lady
@scav: “BASIC SKILLS ARE FOR LOSERS!!!”
schrodingers_cat
@Alison Rose: A lot of the things that you use day to day are the practical applications of the quadratic formula.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: And these are the same people who can’t balance check books.
Lyrebird
@Alison Rose: I agree that more life skills should be featured. I also think that everyone should graduate HS equipped to understand interest rates, like for loans and mortgages, and some other key stuff that’s essentially algebra.
H.E.Wolf
Weird data point on the cursive curve here: I’m a southpaw who by preference writes in ink, in cursive… with a spare piece of paper under my writing hand, to reduce the inevitable smears to a reasonable number.
I write a lot of old-style postal letters, because my thoughts flow differently when I hand-write them, than when I type. When I write to people who might have missed out on cursive, I print. It’s all good!
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat:
WHO BALANCES A CHECKBOOK? YOU JUST WAVE YOUR PHONE AT THINGS AND THE THINGS BECOME YOURS!!! THEN YOU GET LITTLE CANDY ICONS ON YOUR PHONE! MONEY ISN’T REAL!!!
Anyway
@different-church-lady:
Amen! What is this balancing the check book? Never did it, don’t plan to start — I write maybe two checks a year …
Mai Naem mobile
A friend’s toy chihuahua just died after surgery. He kept getting kidney stones. They had him on a special diet and a med. The dog’s around a year old and he’d taken him to the vet at least six times for kidney stones. I knew somebody else who also got a toy small dog breed(IIRC maltese) three times and all three had a lot of medical issues and ended up dying really young. I’ve come to believe really little or really big dogs just have a much higher chance of medical issues and don’t live long.
Alison Rose
@schrodingers_cat: Possibly, but I myself have never had to work out the equation. I’ve never held a job that required math beyond basic addition, division, etc.
I mean, I’ve also never utilized whatever dissecting a fucking frog was supposed to teach us. (To be fair, I didn’t do any of the dissecting. I made my partner touch the frog and I just wrote everything down, while trying not to look.)
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: Please, only super old people use checks anymore anyway. It’s all digital balance transfers now. And you can see your balance and pending transactions in your banking apps instantly and in real time. :p
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
OMG, Baud is back!
I’ve been enjoying this thread.
Cursive? No thanks.
Cannabis? Well-regulated and in edible form, please.
If you’re a newby, eat 5mg THC or less and wait at least an hour. If you get paranoid, go for an indica strain (but be prepared for lethargy).
Teach the youth touch-typing!
ETA: And teach them household budgeting and finances. Thanks Alison Rose!
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: General innumeracy scares me. It would be ridiculous to expect someone met at random to be able to solve a Bessel function, or even to know what one is, but everyday I encounter people who cannot perform basic arithmetic. eg what’s a 2 and a half times 30?
What really scares me is peoples inability to even get a ball park figure ie when presented with which is nearest to 7 * 17.2 a) 50, b) 100 c) 150
being completely stumped
Juju
@different-church-lady: I was born in 1961 and my youngest brother was born in 1964. I am of the first year that social security starts at 67. I’m not a fan of Reagan. I didn’t notice that I dropped the a from Reagan in my comment, but I don’t feel bad about it. He deserves it. Also thank you for recognizing bull shit when you see it.
Percysowner
In my younger years i.e. 60+ years ago, I was a straight A student with terrible handwriting. I did all the drills and still my handwriting sucked. Around 5th grade I finally got the idea to print my notes taken during class and they were really pretty legible. One day the teacher saw me printing, took my notes balled them up and told me that I HAD to use cursive for note taking. It was so humiliating and wrong. I still used cursive on tests and reports. So I went back to cursive and my notes were illegible to anyone but me. Now a days, I just type everything on my computer.
Basically, people should thank God I’m nobody important, because any handwritten material I might have left would not be readable even by the most skilled researchers in cursive.
different-church-lady
@Alison Rose:
It’s supposed to teach us that cutting open organisms is something best left to others.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin:
BANK: “Would you like an alert every time you buy something?”
ME: “I ALREADY FUCKIN’ KNOW I’M BUYING SOMETHING!!!”
Dorothy A. Winsor
Someone upthread mentioned learning Latin in high school. I did that too. The reasoning was it would help you learn other languages. But you know what? Learning Spanish would have been learning one of those languages to start with and would also have helped me learn other languages. To me, teaching cursive is like that. I don’t exactly object. Learning Latin taught me some useful things (as learning Spanish would have done). It’s a question of time available.
Percysowner
@Alison Rose:
This scene from an older movie, Peggy Sue Got Married, sums it up pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3eKzmozvrI
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
And others have and do use quadratic equations.
Teaching is about possibilities, not only necessities.
How does a school know what you will do with the things that are taught? How does a school teach to those with the highest possibilities and those not quite there? Never present the possibilities? We all have different talents as humans, different paths we take in life. Sure they might not be all that much different in overall – we eat, we breathe, we procreate – or don’t, we grow, we raise, we live, we die – but the roads we travel are different, often as different as day and night. We are female or male or inbetween or don’t know. We grow, we learn, we don’t. Some make 6 months, some make over 100 yrs. It’s a ride, sometimes smooth, some times terrifying, often tomorrow can’t even be contemplated, it comes anyway.
I’m an old, yet my tomorrows are as unknown as they were when I had no idea what tomorrow means. Sure I have a better idea, but it is still an idea, not the reality. My point is that we go to school to learn, some of us will use quadratic equations and many will not, in school we teach possibilities. Do/did you ever use trigonometry? I did, for most of my working life. Do/did you ever use more than the 2 decimal points of our currency? The last thing I made in my working life had a tolerance of millionths of an inch. We are all the same and yet we are all different.
scav
@different-church-lady: Well, breathing is a basic skill, as is counting how many votes one has before putting it to the test — on an exam day in public no less.
different-church-lady
My problem isn’t that they don’t teach kids cursive anymore. My problem is that they don’t teach kids ANYTHING anymore.
Brit in Chicago
@Eyeroller: So-called “full-retirement age” is gradually going up, but I don’t think that the minimum age for receiving SS checks has changed (still 62, right?), or the age at which your benefits max out, so the age past which it’s not worth delaying (70). Aren’t those more important numbers overall?
different-church-lady
@scav: There’s a joke that ends with the bear saying, “Say… you’re not exactly here for the hunting, are you?”
The bear was saying that to Jim Jordan this week.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady:
Well, I have never tried acid. But I can’t smoke marijuana because of respiratory issues. And my experience with edibles has been as follows: I eat the edible, I feel absolutely nothing for 4 hours, and then I suddenly feel like i’ve been hit with a tranquilizer dart. My brain feels slow and cloudy, and I experience a significant degradation in physical coordination to the point it’s hard to walk
I still have to overpriced edibles from my last trip to a fresno dispensary that I may never eat.
wjca
I went to high school back in the mists of time, when there were 3 tracks. The regular classes, the “honors” classes (for the kids bound for top flight universities), and the “general” classes (for those expected to max out in junior college.**
One year, my schedule landed me in a class called General Business. It covered everything from taxes to life insurance to double entry bookkeeping to basic contracts; basically, what you’d need to run a small business. It was, by far, the most useful class, across my lifetime, that I ever took.
** It was a small high school in a town which was just starting to go from farm town to suburb. But education was big: out of 250 in my graduating class, all but 2 were in college the next year. A plurality in the local junior college, to be sure. But college was just what one did after high school.
Gvg
@Kay: Part of the picture is that we were told obvious bullshit for decades about how dangerous pot was when we all knew lots of people who had used it and not turned into hard drug user and weren’t violent. The hysterical law makers and police who did not even know that pot made most people very very mellow, sleepy and hungry for snacks. Then they claimed scientific studies that proved all these things. So we learned they lied, stupidly. We don’t trust any studies done while it’s illegal. Once it isn’t and researcher can just study it without bias, I hope to find out something I can trust.
I can start without waiting for studies and state anything you smoke or put in your lungs is bad. Fern growers get sick from spores if they don’t mask, woodworkers have vacuum systems to keep sawdust out of their lungs, coal miners get black lung disease. The bongs do not filter it enough, per filtration tests.
Naturally we have to regulate it, rather like alcohol, but there is a problem with a past of false government information.
different-church-lady
@Citizen Alan:
Yes, that is what’s supposed to happen. What’s not supposed to happen is within 10 minutes you’re watching one frame from every movie ever made, except someone has written all over each frame differently in day-glo markers and then you get really paranoid while throwing up for two hours.
WereBear
@Mai Naem mobile: And often they are fashionable and bred by con artists. You really have to fuss over genetics and they don’t.
different-church-lady
@Gvg:
Smoke? In lungs? How quaint. Kinda like the trippin’ version of balancing your checkbook.
WereBear
@Alison Rose: LOL. I chose my lab partner because he would touch the frog, and I did everything else.
Including wielding the scalpel. Just couldn’t touch it.
Ken
@different-church-lady: I think the utility is for those times when you aren’t buying something. Like a year ago when I got a message from my credit card company, asking me if I had just purchased over a thousand dollars of electronic equipment in California. I was sitting in Illinois at the time….
Alison Rose
@WereBear: I begged my mom to write me a note to get out of it, because I was so disgusted, but she thought I just wanted to not have to do the work. It was vile and the classroom smelled awful for days.
Scout211
Whether it’s time availability or usefulness of what we learn as a child for our adult life, it ignores the reality that learning different things in many different ways is stimulating the brain and increasing our brain’s capabilities for the rest of our lives. That’s one of the reasons why eliminating music and art in the elementary schools is so sad. It’s not just for the love of art and music but also for opening up more parts of the brain to learning, creativity and cognition. These have lifelong implications. But I do agree that there needs to be a balance and I’m no expert on how to do that.
My younger daughter is a dual language kinder teacher and much of the support for dual language teaching in elementary schools comes from research that shows a greater capacity to learn and to think creatively later in life when two languages are learned while learning the curriculum in the classroom.
ETA: edited for clarity
SFAW
@dnfree:
Just goes to show that the libtards/Demon-craps were
groomingindoctrinating you, even way back then!Geminid
@Citizen Alan: My friend Joan brought some gummies back from Massachusetts last time she went up. She’ll cut a gummie in quarters and eat one in the morning. That’s an “Energy” type, and Joan might eat a quarter of a “Rest” type in the evening.
One thing about THC: its a tolerance drug. If you don’t use it much, you don’t need much for it to be effective. I think that’s a problem with people having bad experiences with edibles. They seem to be occasional users, but the products are aimed at people with higher tolerance.
WereBear
@Alison Rose: It was the fetal pig that got to me. AP Biology.
Brit in Chicago
@wjca: I’m a Boomer with citizenship in both countries, and don’t want to go back to the 1950’s in either case. I loved it when my UK passport was also an EU passport, and am sad and angry that that’s no longer the case.
Juju
@Alison Rose: I am a former teacher, and I feel the need to point out that especially in high school, a lot of the courses a student takes is to figure out what interests the student, or where the student’s skills are, and point them in a direction where those skills and interests will benefit them in their future. My guess is that you had some required courses, and if you didn’t do particularly well in those areas or they didn’t interest you, you didn’t need to go beyond that one or two courses. I’m not a big fan of algebra myself, and the class was a pain, but in the end I’m glad I took it, if only to know it wasn’t for me.
scav
Many of the arguments against cursive in this thread go even harder against having any sort of art, music or literature classes in elementary schools. It’s not as though they’re useful as such. Never have to use that shit on the job. And, while cursive isn’t at all the hill I’d chose to fight on, I think we’re wrestling with a variety of assumptions as to what education is for. I don’t see it as limited to early career training, but more on opening up, establishing fundamental general skills and facilitating learning how to learn and how to solve problems — and exposing individuals to a variety of areas and arenas so they can find the one (or ones) they find suitable. If anything, I’d like lower education to be more polytechnic — and I’d like more early language exposure. Not sure how to fit everything in.
Alison Rose
@Juju: I would have been fine if math stopped at geometry, which is at least widely applicable in the real world. I didn’t see any reason to be required to take algebra II, when I knew I was going to be an English major and had no interest in a job with lots of math.
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: That alert is so that when someone is pretending to be you and they buy something you know about it immediately.
Ken
Now I’m wondering if those are like unused medicine, where you’re supposed to take them to a hospital or pharmacy with one of those drop-boxes, or like expired food where you can put it in the garbage.
I suppose donating them to a food bank is right out.
Gvg
@Betty Cracker: Florida is not teaching cursive now.
Ruckus
@Juju:
When you were born has a place in history but that’s been true since humanity day one. And yes, life has changed a hell of a lot. Most of the difference was created by the ability to communicate, like we are doing now. Our worlds have grown because we can communicate in real or close to real time, often, as we are doing right now, with humans we will very likely never met. The world is far different than when I was born, but that is and has been pretty common over the last 100 yrs as we have learned to communicate without having to be in the same place. Humanity has changed more in the last 100 yrs than it seemingly did in a thousand before that. What we are doing right now, communicating across hundreds or thousands of miles without being in the same place is a big part of that. We can communicate across distance, time, language. This has changed the world.
And it has changed food and ideas and history and possibilities.
schrodingers_cat
@kalakal: I have students use the calculator to find sin 0 degrees. or sin 90 degrees Calculators are fine, but many people have no feel for numbers as your example points out.
Geminid
@Ken: I think if someone put the edibles in a paper bag marked “Edibles” and dropped it on a sidewalk when no one was looking, it would likely be gone in 20 minutes. They’d want to do this during the day when schools are in session..
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: oh god.
Scout211
@Alison Rose: You may not use what you learned in math classes in your adult life but because you learned them and learning them stimulated your brain, they may have had an effect on your ability to learn other things or understand other concepts later in your life.
There are the things you learn and then there is what goes on in your brain as you learn those things. Both are valuable, IMHO.
Eolirin
@Alison Rose: I found that geometry didn’t fully make sense to me until I started learning calc.
And you kinda need algebra 2 for that.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Balancing a checkbook means you are participating in late stage capitalism.
Biden is mean, he is not forgiving my student loans./snark.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: I heard a story about a physics PhD being asked at their defense:
Is the wavelength of light bigger than a breadbox.
Yes, they were a theorist. Yes, they had trouble with it.
;-)
IOW, yes, math and numbers don’t click with lots of us.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Alison Rose: You learn about non-linear functions in Algebra II.
You need the exponential growth function to understand everything from your mortgage, credit card debt, COVID-19 spread before vaccination and a nuclear explosion.
You can’t teach about the exponential funcion before you deal with power 2 (your quadratic equation that you think is useless)
Scout211
I went back to the article that posted the list and clicked through on the Florida link. It was dated 8 years ago! So yeah, it was outdated. I wonder how many other states on that list were outdated.
Thanks for the correction.
opiejeanne
@Anyway: Even when I wrote a lot of checks, back in the Dark Ages, I rarely balanced my checkbook because it seemed like a waste of time to find that one penny that the bank and I disagreed on, and when I did find it, it was always my mistake.
I do my banking online with a credit union, pay our bills, keep an eye on the budget, and the only complaint I have is that if you want to look up a transaction it won’t let me look by name of company/person, have to approximate a date or know the exact amount.
Mai Naem mobile
@kalakal: I’ve dealt with young construction guys who talk about how they didn’t need anything they learned in school including math. They don’t realize there’s a fair bit of math involved in construction. Some of them didn’t actually learn it and with them you waste some time when you’re discussing amounts of material to buy.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose: @WereBear: Just the smell of formaldehyde made me sick. My school counselor always scheduled appointments with me whenever we were supposed to dissect anything. I think frogs and cow eyeballs were the only two we had to do, but I’m not totally sure of that because I was never there. :-)
Juju
@Percysowner: Teaching has changed a lot over the years. That kind of reaction to your note taking method would not be acceptable now. I understand how you must have felt. When I was in the 5th grade I had a teacher who couldn’t stand that I read with my hair hanging down over the book. It never bothered me or hindered my reading, but it bothered her to the point that in the middle of the personal reading time she came up behind me, yanked my hair into an awkward and painful ponytail and used a rubberband to keep my hair away from my face and told me in front of the whole class that she would do that to me every time she saw my hair like that. That was not a good school year. That woman was teacher of the year a few times. Now that behavior would get her fired.
trollhattan
@Mai Naem mobile: Sorry about your friend’s wee dog.IDK about chihuahuas but it’s possible/likely the breed has known issues that responsible breeders are scrupulous about selecting from lines not showing those flaws, back multiple generations.Many popular breeds have numerous issues.
My first-hand experience is Dalmatians, which have chronic hearing loss, skin problems, bladder stones from not tolerating purines in their diet. Our first, a rescue, had that last one (needed surgery to remove many stones from his bladder) and was on prescription food and medication over a luckily long life. Because he was a rescue during a time Dalmatians were super popular (Disney, you know) it’s likely he came from a puppy farm or hobby breeder.
Dogs who suffer because of irresponsible breeding are impossibly sad critters.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: That is not cursive
How did you manage to change the font?
Eolirin
@kalakal: I think the second problem is legitimately tricky to approximate, especially since you picked values that fall pretty close to halfway between two of your answers. It’s easy to know it’s more than 100 and less than 150.
But at 120.4 it’s only barely closer to 100 than 150.
dnfree
@Scout211: Two of my grandchildren were in bilingual elementary schools K-6. They had separate teachers for English and Spanish, half-day with each teacher in kindergarten, then later whole days. In 7-8 grade (different school) the kids from their elementary school studied certain subjects in Spanish, and in high school (different district) they take Spanish class. They’re quite fluent.
The elementary was intended to be about half native speakers of each language, but it’s now tilted tilted toward more Spanish-speakers because their families have moved to the attendance area. Speaking Spanish is one thing, but the families want kids to be able to read and write both languages.
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
A lot of people don’t know what they want to be/do at an early age. I wanted to be a doctor. But I wish I’d known a lot earlier and had a mother that respected my desires and ideals. Mine chose what I was supposed to do with my life and while it wasn’t a bad choice she did the same for my sisters and neither of them got closer to doing what mom wanted than oldest sister taught elementary school for one year. It really, really, really wasn’t her. She ended up doing what she wanted but didn’t know early on, landscape architecture. She was very good at it, won awards, also taught it and enjoyed what she did. I ended up having 3 different careers in my life, none of them what I thought I wanted as a youngster and one of them what mom wanted. Give your kids possibilities, ideas, don’t choose for them, teach them to reach and choose for themselves. That is the best gift you can give your kids and yourself.
opiejeanne
@Eolirin: I have to write checks a couple of times a year, to people whose businesses have not yet caught up to the modern world.
Rant: These same people are probably still using a bank instead of a credit union, so they’re paying the bank to keep track of their money and for the bank to use it. Leaving BofA was difficult for several reasons, but we have not regretted it in the past 10 years.
schrodingers_cat
@Another Scott: Visible light wavelengths are orders of magnitude smaller than the bread box (400 -900nm)
1 Nanometer is 10^ (-9) m or 0.000000001 m
trollhattan
@Mai Naem mobile:
“I need two yards of concrete in here.”
“I’ll get my tape measure.”
Mai Naem mobile
I read somewhere that some schools have started offering ‘adulting’ classes which involve budgeting, taxes, insurance etc. It really is a good idea. There’s a lot of kids with parents who either don’t or can’t teach their kids this stuff.
Barbara
@trollhattan: I was talking to my daughter about this. Chihuahuas are being bred to be too small. I haven’t heard about kidney stones but hydrocephalus is apparently fairly common at birth because the head is not large enough for the brain. So infuriatingly sad.
Sister Golden Bear
@Kay:
FWIW, ConsumerLab.com does Consumer Reports-style testing a wide variety of supplements to ensure they contain the dosage advertised. They also show the cost per dose for each of the supplements they test, which is useful for finding the least expensive one.
CL doesn’t test for effectiveness, but they do have excellent round-ups of what the available research on a supplement shows (or doesn’t show), as well as details about the tests, from which you can gauge reliability of the test.
It does require a paid subscription ($60 year, discount for 2 years), but for me it’s well worth the price.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: Carpenters often use the ratio(?) 3,4,5 to lay out and check right angled work.
Some of them know about the quadratic equation, and others don’t. If you asked them, “Did you know that 3 squared plus 4 squared equals 5 squared?” they might answer, “Nope. Do you think Dallas’s secondary can handle Joe Burris this Sunday?”
opiejeanne
@different-church-lady: The phone calls were appreciated when we had just walked out of a store that had had its clients’ info hacked, but other than that unnecessary.
I get alerts from people phishing, pretending to be my bank and telling me OHNOSOMETHINGBADISABOUTTOHAPPENTOALLOFYOURMONEY!!!1! but otherwise, I don’t get notices on my phone from my actual banking institution.
Juju
I have a text alert system that I didn’t even know about until I once got a text asking if I made a purchase of $350 at a Louisville Applebees, a $250 purchase at a Louisville Kroger and a $100 GameStop online purchase within a two hour time span on my debit card. I didn’t and I let them know and everything was taken care of without any pain to my bank account or me. I suspect that’s why your bank offers that, but most banks have an algorithm that sees odd for you, bank card purchases. It’s actually a nice feature.
Barbara
@Sister Golden Bear: Another strategy is to buy brands sold or made in Germany, which has purity regulations. Some American brands undergo voluntary testing and are usually labeled with the logo of a testing lab. These brands are, duh, typically more expensive.
scribbler
@Dorothy A. Winsor: In theory I agree with you. And that’s probably true for most people. But for me, a college English major and a lover of etymology, my 4 years of high school Latin were the best!
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat:
𝓘 𝓫𝓵𝓪𝓶𝓮 𝓕𝓨𝓦𝓟.
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@Juju:
The ‘baby boom’ has always been from 1946 to 1964. Which made sense as long as it was all about the birth rate.
But then when they got into Generation X and Millennials and Gen Z, it became about the cultural circumstances of each generation, and 19 years’ worth of Boomers have not had a single cultural experience.
For instance, I was born in early 1954, and my wife was born in late 1964. I grew up on mid to late 1960s rock/pop, and she grew up on disco. In general, it seems to me that people born in the early 1960s have more in common with Gen X than with the rest of us Boomers.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
Dogs who suffer because of irresponsible breeding are impossibly sad critters.
That can happen to any animal, including humans. OK it’s more the upbringing and demands on the outcome with humans but still, irresponsibility of creation (breeding) is and always will be an issue.
opiejeanne
@Percysowner: Ha! When I was making costumes I did use algebra to figure out how to cut the center of a circle-skirt to fit the waist without needing to be gathered to fit the waistband. I created a bunch of quarter circles as patterns with the waist size marked on them. I made a lot of those skirts.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: What I don’t get: how come people keep saying that the younger generations resent Boomers? I often hear people half my age call me an “Ok Boomer.”
trollhattan
@Barbara:
That’s really awful.
I’ve been pondering the rise of French bulldog as #1 in popularity. Here’s a list of their known genetic health issues.
Chondrodystrophy and Chondrodysplasia (CDPA/CDDY, IVDD)
Progressive Retinal Atrophy (PRA-CORD1)
Malignant Hyperthermia (MH)
Degenerative Myelopathy (CDM)
Hereditary Cataracts (HC)
Multifocal Retinopathy 1 (CMR 1)
Congenital Hypothyroidism (CHG)
Hyperuricosuria (HUU)
Dilated Cardiomyopathy (CDM)
👀 👀 👀
What could possibly go wrong?
Eolirin
@Ruckus: Tell that to the Habsburgs
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Presumably humans aren’t being bred for money (but, surrogacy!) while dogs absolutely are and while it’s not possible to eliminate the passing on of known breed defects, ethical breeding can greatly reduce the odds. Selective breeding brought them to us, but most when D, N and A were just letters in the alphabet.
opiejeanne
@WereBear: Meh. I skipped biology and took chemistry instead, which helped me pass Algebra 2, surprisingly. Both classes were using the same math at one point, and the Chem teacher explained it better than the math teacher did.
kalakal
@Mai Naem mobile:
That’s exactly what I meant
@Eolirin: fair point but all I’m really asking someone to do
is add 70 and 49
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
I was well versed in it. I learned to write cursive in third grade, I think it was when we were introduced to it. Fourth at the absolute latest.
And so I wrote all my school assignments for the next several years in cursive, because that’s what they expected.
Then in ninth grade, I discovered I could take class notes both faster and more completely, and way more legibly, if I printed in very small letters, two lines of printing per line on the page. (I couldn’t have written that small in cursive to save my life. ‘Fine motor skills,’ my ass.)
After that, I only wrote in cursive when it was expected of me, and that wasn’t for very much longer, thank goodness.
My son, who is a junior in high school, had to learn to write cursive in elementary school. It’s been years since he’s written in cursive. Clearly his teachers in middle and high school haven’t expected it of him, and neither do I. (And he’s a very artistic kid, unlike his math geek parents, but that still hasn’t given him any love of cursive.)
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
But your computer doesn’t write in cursive. :-)
This showed up on my phone as a kind of imitation cursive, but it was really printed letters with a cursive slant and little connections between the letters. The ‘r’, for instance, was a print-style ‘r’ – a script ‘r’ has a very different shape from a printed ‘r’, no way to confuse them.
On my desktop, though, it showed up in the ‘comic sans’ font.
kalakal
@lowtechcyclist:
This. It also depends very much on where you were born and lived
Juju
@Alison Rose: school curriculums are different from state to state. I’m a little surprised you were required to go beyond algebra 1. I had to pass the algebra regents exam that NY required back when I was in high school, which was basic algebra. I didn’t have to go beyond that once the regents exam was passed. I passed and I didn’t go beyond. You’re right about the lingering stink that the frog dissection made was disgusting. To this day I hate that smell.
Eolirin
@kalakal: Granted, but getting there is almost as slow as calculating the full answer, which only has the added step of adding 1.4. If they’re gonna fail the first one they’re gonna fail the second.
I would expect people to have an intuitive ability to know it’s more than 50 and less than, say, 200. Failing at that is a bigger problem.
schrodingers_cat
I have been playing around with dip pens (mostly for drawing) and let me tell you that is far easier to write in cursive when you are using those.
Ruckus
@Juju:
As far as I’m concerned you can consider yourself whatever generation you want. I believe the time frame shown was because of births that largely increased after WWII (all those horny folks getting back together, showing their appreciation for being alive) and if I recall, slowed down a bit around 1964. Recall that communications increased a lot, maybe exponentially during that time. WWII was a huge deal to the world, I know I’m one of the early births of that “boomer” period, 1946-1964 (maybe it’s because the 46 and 64 are reversed?). OK I can also be a smartass at times…..some say ALL the time…..
But I believe that communications was the #1 reason for the changes after WWII/1946. And that came about because of manufacturing that WWII required. The changes in what and how things were built was immense during WWII. That and being part of the winning team. How children were taught and what changed. Manufacturing changed. And yes one of my careers was manufacturing. Technology in my lifetime has changed in ways that anyone not involved in manufacturing might not notice, but I have a difficult time seeing anyone my age who doesn’t recognize that change as more than blind and/or an idiot.
Every aspect of life has changed, and it is all because of science/technology. OK and politics.
Juju
@Citizen Alan: The next time you’re in the mood to do that let me know. I’ll give you a regular gummy bear, wait four hours and wack you in the head with an old fashioned encyclopedia.
Scout211
Actually, that ‘r’ in Baud’s comment is very similar to the way my mother was taught to write an ‘r’ cursive and she taught us to write it that way, too. We had to unlearn that ‘r’ when we learned cursive in school because the cursive ‘r’ had changed since my mother was in school.
lowtechcyclist
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Hell yeah. One problem I always had when trying to write down my own thoughts, was that my thoughts ran way ahead of how fast I could write them down. WYSIWYG typing was a godsend; my fingers can almost keep up with my thoughts.
I’ll keep that in mind. Right now, as a Federal employee, I’m not supposed to touch the stuff because it’s still against Federal law. And having observed that stricture this long, what’s another several weeks? But I’ve been thinking about trying it again, come the new year when I’ll be free as a bird.
‘Again’ because I’m not entirely a newbie. (But close enough at this point.) I smoked dope in the early 1970s and enjoyed it, but by about 1975, I’d smoke and smoke without any effect, then blam! I wouldn’t be able to remember the beginning of a sentence by the time whoever was saying it (including me!) got to the end. That had a very isolating effect, I’d feel like I was cut off from the other people I was with. That wasn’t fun at all, and so when this happened a few times in a row, I stopped smoking dope.
different-church-lady
@kalakal: That’s exactly how I approached it, but then my head started to hurt anyway.
kalakal
@Eolirin: I could have picked a more obvious example.
And you’re right your range of answers is better.
It is something that scares the hell out of me
evodevo
@Scout211: Yes, this…I have complained/emailed edit suggestions to Ancestry i don’t know how many times when I have run into mistakes with names, ages, relationships, etc. on their transliterations of old census forms, and got nowhere. If I didn’t know my ancestors actual names, I would never be able to figure it out from their data…
cain
@Gvg: that’s.your racism right there. Black folks were using it and so a good way to keep them down and do the war on drugs.
I remember the first time I tried hashish and I’m thinking ‘wtf, people are going to jail for this ?’ Made no sense.
That’s when I realized that all this stuff is bullshit.
I agree that taking drugs while your brains are still developing is a bad idea. I don’t really like using the criminal justice system to enforce it though. Education is the key.
cain
@different-church-lady:
Damn. Pot doesn’t do anything for me other than some buzzing feeling in my brain and trouble with hand and I coordination. I don’t feel relaxed or any other extra sensory perception.
I recently did magic mushrooms and same effect but less harsh. We did it as part of a mental health thing for my wife and while she indeed seem to be purging bad stuff .. I was. Bored. I was supposed to feel relaxed or see stuff or something and meh. I must be really neuro-divergent .. even stuff like Vicodin doesn’t do anything for me. I think I’m really adhd. Just asking me to relax causes anxiety cuz I don’t know what relaxed means. Lol.
Eolirin
@cain: Yeah, that’s a key thing that’s been missing from this discussion; pot being illegal isn’t preventing use, though there is some indication that making it legal does result in an uptick. And it’s not something that’s ever going to be legal for people under 18. Teens still use it. Just like they still drink. We know arresting people for that doesn’t lead to better outcomes either.
The primary thing weed being illegal does is make it easier to arrest mostly black people on possession charges and then strip them of the ability to vote.
At minimum decriminalization is a desperate necessity on purely civil rights grounds. And that’s true whether regulation, which I agree is vitally important, is handled appropriately or not. The harm from unregulated use wouldn’t be nothing, but it’s still substantially less than the harm from incarceration over it, and that harm is disproportionately targeted at minorities.
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
Learning that stuff even if you don’t use it also finely tunes your bullshit detector.
I find math fascinating but I am not particularly good at it. Stuff like discrete mathematics really starts delving into some really creative thinking that veers towards the philosophical.
cain
@lowtechcyclist:
I learned cursive but when I got to college in the late 80s I started using printing of characters instead. I took a bit of a speed hit but it was lot more legible.
Mai Naem mobile
@trollhattan: I have a friend who also had a rescue Dalmation during the 101 Dalmations period which had several medical issues. I’m sure her dog was a similar case.
different-church-lady
@cain: That’s what I’m saying: it’s not “pot” anymore, it’s pure chemicals suspended in candy. And in Massachusetts there’s like three places you can get it legally on every block. Pure madness waiting to become a crisis.
wjca
That has certainly been a huge change. Or succession of changes at high speed.
But I suspect that nearly as great an impact has been from speed and ease of travel. A century ago, if you wanted to get any distance at reasonable speed you were looking at rail (over land) or ship (over oceans, but also along rivers). Now, you can hop on a plane and be anywhere in the world, mostly in less than a day. And at a price at least as affordable than those voyages across the Atlantic were.
That has had an impact on how feasible immigration is. Which means that there is more of it, leading to xenophobic reactions which seem to be more widespread now than when most places saw relatively few immigrants. But it also means that countries which are attractive are getting a lot of talented and hard working from the rest of the world.** If they are wise, they realize what a blessing that is to those who arrived earlier,.
** Twenty years ago, South Asians were quite rare here. Now the town next to mine, population around 50,000, is something like 40% South Asian.
wjca
It’s an exercise that was critical when your personal economy was close to the edge. As in, you might not have the money in the bank to cover a check, so you needed to know not to write it. Whereas, if you had enough in the bank to cover a couple of month’s expenses, you didn’t really need to think about it.
wjca
Worse, it’s 20.4% greater that 100, and 19.7% less than 150. So even closer to equally close. And on the other (150) side!
Ruckus
@dnfree:
I’m an old and I went to elementary school in the 1950s. Left handers were not allowed to write with their dominate hand. I never understood why everyone had to do EVERYDAMNTHING the same. (No I did not misspell that word. That was me obviously screaming.) It made no sense to me that people had to suffer being exactly the same. Hell cars do not come off a production line the same. And making everything exactly the same is fucking impossible. I know because I manufactured a lot of things in my life, mostly metal stuff with tolerances of a thousandth of an inch, which is 0.001, or smaller. As I stated on BJ earlier the last thing I machined had a tolerance of 25 millionths of an inch. Which is a damn small number. I now am now almost done building my furniture and the tolerances are slightly larger. Sandpaper is a wonderful invention….
wjca
But to a physicist, “light” covers any kind of electromagnetic radiation. So we have radio waves, which are both shorter and longer than a breadbox, depending on the frequence.
I suppose the best answer would have been “Sometimes.”
StringOnAStick
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Thank you for that list. From my experience, both Oregon and Colorado have done a good job with their legal pot systems. It is easy to talk to a budtender and you tell them how strong you want or what you want it for, and they suggest options. My husband has occasional insomnia so he gets a 5mg edible that is great for making him sleepy. We also get 5 mg edibles for energy, creativity, Whatever and use them maybe a few times a month. It is fun to be an old broad and tell the young man at the counter that you’d like a good body high strain for sex.
The thing that needs to be investigated as much as anything else mentioned here is the carrier oils used to vape anything. Inhaling the vapor of any oil has to be not good for lungs, whether it is being used to ingest tobacco or pot derivatives, or anything at all. I tried it once and knew instantly it was bad. A hit or two the old fashioned way is much less irritating to the lungs.
If you want to lose young people out of our coalition, going after pot and vaping is a guaranteed way to do it unfortunately. Study it, yes, and get the results out there, but some of the things I’ve read in this thread will instantly turn off young people, so tread carefully.
Kathleen
@artem1s: I’ve had a feeling the ODP is comprised of lefties. That would explain why it’s so ineffective. I don’t think David Pepper helped but these are vague suspicions and I don’t have data other than the fact he endorsed Nina Turner over Shontel Brown (though this was after he was Party Chair). His Blue Ohio org is good though and I’m a dues paying member.
Ruckus
@StringOnAStick:
I used to know a fella who was a pot and coke dealer. And no not the drink…. His brother was a cop. I don’t think his brother actually knew he was a dealer, but I’d bet the suspicion was there….
I wasn’t interested in his products but he was a good buddy and rode/raced motorcycles like I did. He and his brother had a racing side hack (You basically lay down to ride them, with a license plate. I rode on it a couple of times, a lot of fun and a lot of work.) He passed away a few years ago, in his mid 60s. (I met him and a buddy who is older than me and still here 2 days after I got discharged from the navy.) Way back then you had to know a good dealer to get good whatever. Today you can buy it in a store. OK not the coke. Which is a better thing. Times have changed. As they always do. Life goes on. Or doesn’t. It always has the same start and the same end. Not here one day, then OUCH and you are here. And some time later you aren’t. Had a cousin that lasted 6 months. Now I’m the oldest member of the extended family. It starts, it proceeds and it ends. Make the most of it, this one is the only one you will know.
kalakal
@wjca: lol! I’m beginning to think numeracy may not be the issue here
Ruckus
@wjca:
I was in the navy. I’ve crossed the Atlantic 6 times. I’ve sailed above the Arctic Circle in winter, I’ve visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 3 times in summer. That was over 50 yrs ago. Life changes in many ways. It can change more often now because we communicate a hell of a lot faster. Where in the world can’t you call now? And yes I flew in planes then. They are a bit better now and fly farther and faster. I’ve flown to New Zealand and back, from Los Angeles, in this century. I don’t think it’s half way around the world but it is pretty damn far. Takeoff to touchdown 13+ hours. And a change of day.