I understand and agree with your sentiment, but just don't buy the uni-tasker type lego. They make plenty of sets where most if not all of the parts are general and can be used for undirected play.
I’m up voting because I want to hear this side of the argument. I guess your point is that most people’s experience isn’t that bad, and they owe their parents.
Sure, so it can just be a matter of balancing how they treat you and your family vs basic decency and the benefit of merely maintaining contact and having them around as grandparents for your kids. Everyone’s experience and tolerance is different.
I don’t think we necessarily owe our parents. They made the conscious decision to have us and raise us, that ought to be a reward in it self.
I certainly will the best I can for my kids, but I don’t want them to think they owe me anything. This is especially true if I am (unknowingly or unconsciously) treating them or their family very badly.
> Some thirty or so years ago, Bessel functions were included in
the syllabus, but in our day they are out of the question.
> Teaching a subject of which no honest examples can be given is, in my opinion, demoralizing.
I don't get this. Differential equations theory is about proving existence and uniqueness of solutions. If you have to use numerical techniques to actually compute the solution, then that's perfectly fine. After all, even if the solution is explicit, like sin(x), or especially a special function, then we still need to use numerical techniques to actually evaluate that explicit solution.
> You're taking juicy green or red beans that visually resemble cranberries, and turning them hard and black to the point that they nearly resemble charcoal.
The beans are treated and dried before roasting. Before roasting, they resemble dry legumes more than anything else.
I generally agree with your sentiment. I think there's an important distinction to add. By and large, people don't fully expect their mobile devices to be general purpose computing machines in the same way that their PCs are. What I expect from my phone, primarily, is convenience and usability.
Of course, at least on android devices, it's not at all uncommon to install custom variants of the OS (CyanogenMod, etc.), so it does happen.
I find it really depressing that the only business model that seems to work online is ads. Paying for things by ads is so convoluted and distorting.
There should really be a open micro-payments systems. I absolutely don't mind paying $0.10 to read an article, I'm already investing much more, in a dollars/minute sense by reading the article anyway. I guess the trick is to do this in a very automatic and anonymous way.
Notice how there is no way to pay google for using gmail, maps, etc., even if you wanted to (maybe if you sign up as a business?). I'd much rather just pay Google $100 per year, than introduce all the problems associated with monetizing my data.
I find it odd that there's no universal system for blocking calls from specific numbers. I'm guessing you could implement a spam filter, so Harassment/telemarketing wouldn't be a problem.
>The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.
I think it's the right political conclusion, even if the reasoning is questionable.
Just because you could conduct research to root out differences in populations of females and males, it doesn't mean that you should. What's the point? It seems to be that these arguments are used to justify gender disparity in occupations, achievement, etc.
Strictly speaking, math it self isn't intended to reflect reality. It's just logical system together with some initial axioms. But it does happen to model reality very well, given the right interpretations.