I’m 100% neurotypical and and find that pretty much every community is just a bunch of relatable memes. ADHD, Autism, Bi-polar disorder, depression, etc.
Same thing with all the various sexual identities. I’ll call out bisexual people because I think most of them will admit it: they’ll take literally any behavior and appropriate it as a key element of bi culture. Lemon bars? Bi. Bad sitting posture? Bi. Cuffed jeans? Bi. Finger guns? You’re not a goofy sitcom character, you’re bi! Appropriating any innocuous behavior as part of your sexual identity’s culture? Bi!
I’ve got no problem with it. Anything for more good memes.
It’s not just bis. Gays do it to. I found out from Reddit gay subs that I should be a fast walker. Apparently gay people all walk fast. Not something I’ve ever noticed.
I’m born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.
I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I’ve never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.
Considering the discussion here around tech literacy, I’d like to share this insight: technology access is not technology literacy.
Many, many years ago, we could conflate the two and did so freely. Say, back before 2010 or so. Nowadays, everyone has a very powerful computing device in their pocket, but not everyone fully comprehends how it works. And unfortunately, concepts like digital securtiy, digital rights management, digital privacy, and so on, are still squarely in the literacy camp.
I can’t say for sure what proportion of the population is in the full comprehension group, but I suspect it’s still in the minority.
Automobiles are a great analogue of this: we’re 100 years in and everyone is (still) not a mechanic, nor do they make decisions like one.
Even with access to the entire internet, search engines, discussion forums, etc. it’s still tough to move the needle on politically charged IT issues. Education and awareness are key to solving all this. Generational differences and exposure to technology at different points in its evolution are not, and never will be, enough.
When I was a kid and they were parroting that dumb shit, I already had a calculator wristwatch. In fact, I probably bought that calculator watch specifically because my teachers kept saying that. Even back then it was well within the budget of a 6th grade punk who shoveled a couple of driveways or mowed a lawn or two.
I get being annoyed by the excuse when your kid, but it’s bizarre seeing adults still harping on this decades later.
You couldn’t use a calculator in math class for the same reason you couldn’t use a segway in gym class. Because there’s a lot more going on in a math class than just teaching you how to enter the correct answer.
Like… presumably most people here took some college of some kind, it shouldn’t be hard to grasp that education is a complex and multifaceted thing. It was never just about getting every answer right.
What’s monumentally moronic is that a tiny subset of teachers still try to use this line, here and now, in AD 2023. It was still quite highly moronic in the years of my school career, which was happening just on the cusp of the computing revolution – which everyone at the time with at least one functioning brain cell could see looming in all its inevitability just about 6" over the horizon.
Outside of basic arithmetic this canard doesn’t really hold water. Understanding how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide arbitrary numbers without a calculator is, of course, essential. But once that’s understood, it’s really unnecessary to have to stop to figure out by hand whatever the fuck, say, 23 divided by 4081.75 is when it’s just one component of some greater problem. In that context, using a calculator is not a “cheat,” even though some educators to this very day cling to the belief that it is. If you are doing algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. it’s really pointless not to use a calculator for the tedious small stuff, because if you don’t have an understanding of the mechanics of the problem you’re not going to accomplish jack squat… calculator or not.
(Yes, nowadays there are fancy graphing calculators and computer software that can do algebra, trig, etc. for you. You could probably even ask ChatGPT and have a nonzero chance of it getting it right. But back in my day we did not have them, because they were not commonplace, not very capable, and still extremely expensive. And computer software be damned, it was not quite viable yet on a middle or highschooler’s budget to carry a traditional computer with you.)
Sure, I still have the skills to get out a notepad and do a long-division-with-decimals calculation by hand, even in my adulthood when no one has asked me to in decades. But you know what? No one has asked me to in decades. So I’m not going to do that standing in the grocery aisle with a 12 pack of something in my hand, or standing over the milling machine contemplating where to drill the hole in the $1200 piece of material. In the former case I’m going to round off and make an accurate enough assessment for casual purposes, and in the latter case you bet your ass I’m going to get out my calculator or phone.
And yes, I had teachers in high school who absolutely did force us to calculate multivariable algebra or geometry equations without a calculator and screech “SHOW YOUR WORK” at us, which explicitly included all the long multiplication and division and shit, when in reality just simplifying the equation and then solving for X, Y, Z with a calculator would have been just as correct and infinitely less irritating. And no, they did not do this for any other reason than the ironclad belief that if students were not being forced to comply with arbitrary rules and tedium in complete contravention to logic, they were not “learning.” That was considered “cheating.” As it turns out, the point was not to inform. Rather, it was to have an arbitrary and illogical standard to use to berate and punish children. The only thing that was being taught was not to attempt apply logic or speak up, but to submit to authority unquestioningly… or else you get a zero and/or a browbeating/detention. It was bullshit then, it’s still bullshit now.
In the university physics classes I took, if the final answer was 47/69, then that was acceptable because the goal was to show you knew how to get there, and the actual value didn’t really matter.
Also, when the final value does matter, each time you round a number (which you often do when it’s a division you want a calculator for), you’re adding error to the final answer. So avoiding using a calculator as much as possible will increase the accuracy of the final answer when there’s many steps.
That said, they didn’t disallow calculators and didn’t want to see long division or multiplication steps.
My point was that even at university level where the maths are theoretically the hardest they’ve been up to that point, calculators aren’t something that are heavily leaned on.
I absolutely agree with you. I do still laugh at the meme, though. It’s not because I think my teachers were wrong for teaching basic arithmetic; it’s just that “because you won’t have a calculator in your pocket” turned out to be an ironically bad reason. 100% still glad to have learned it, though.
I remember being surprised I could afford a calculator watch. First time I learned about them as a kid, I assumed they were some unattainable, bleeding edge tech.
I haven’t played VR for a couple years, but I played hundreds of hours of it in the 2018-2020 time frame. It has a long way to go but it’s already amazing too.
Personally, I don’t really consider what we’ve got to be really VR yet. IMO that won’t come until we have interfaces that take direct nerve input and override our sensory inputs. And given how our economy runs, I don’t think I’ll trust any company that develops that, as much as I really want it.
Though I also wonder if our brains can handle switching between that and reality. After playing hours of Horizon VR, I noticed having the feeling a few times that my hands weren’t real because I got used to thinking that when I looked at my fake hands in the game.
Well, that tech really progressed fucking fast. We went from calculators being a huge industry of mechanical and electro-mechanical monsters to wristwatch calculators sold for 20 bucks in like a couple decades.
Go look at asianometry for some interesting videos on the matter
I live in Oklahoma, drive an Old Green Truck™, have a lazy dog of unknown breed, and I work in a machine shop. Last week my neighbor and I rebuilt a motorcycle engine and put it in his bike. My wife and I have chickens. I’m a pretty sterotypical “redneck”.
I’ve voted democrat in every election since 2000.
It sounds like OP is terribly confused, and is associating people from two different groups while they really have nothing in common, which is something MAGA dipshits also do.
memes
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.