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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26303 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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This just reads and learned helplessness to me. As though the only possible solution is some manner of apocalypse, when that just serves as a convenient excuse to abandon all personal agency.

I've lucked into an arrangement that works fantastic. I work from home, and maintain productive hobbies. We don't watch TV as a family except sparingly. My wife and I strive to stay off our phones in front of our daughter, usually opting for reading instead.

Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read. If we actually make the leap to homeschooling her next year, I expect these trends to continue and strengthen.

It's honestly not that hard. Stay off your damned phone, and don't give them to children. Also, don't be a slob. Have an industrious hobby instead of being a couch potato.

Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read.

There are tons of drag-and-drop educational programming apps that teach stuff like loops and functions.

You benefit from an overvalued career that doesn’t require you to walk, shake hands, or do much more than bum around on a laptop all day. Presumably, your wife doesn’t work if you’re considering homeschooling. Your opinion on it being “honestly not that hard” is worth very little to the average person.

And I wouldn’t brag too much about the success of your parenting before your child is a teenager. Homeschooled children usually end up weird and unsociable.

Homeschooled children usually end up weird and unsociable.

I'm the 'designated cool grownup' for a homeschooling community. 'Weird' is not a normal thing I see with young people who can't find their way. 'Undersocialized' is, but homeschool graduates are a real mix. There's success stories and there's failures.

Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.

Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.

This is fair, but at the same time I object to all this plain old giving up I see, and simply assuming everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.

everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.

That does happen, but usually with people who are a bit loopy to begin with. Honestly I’m not sure that oversheltering can be cleanly distinguished from controlling parenting or general nuttiness in a lot of those cases.

Like I said, homeschoolers seem to have a pretty wide variance IME. Most are more or less average, some produce kids that are ready to be normal, functional adults by 16, some produce 25 year olds that act like middle schoolers. Going entirely off the worst cases leaves doesn’t paint a good picture, but neither does going entirely off the best.

Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.

Also I doubt he uses a laptop. They're supremely bad ergonomy wise, a screen or two and a keyboard do wonders.

Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.

Fake email-and-excel engineering jobs can be done anywhere your imagination takes you.

Pretty much the entirety of the software field doesn't require anything but an internet connection.

Engineers at least some of them might need to go somewhere and talk to the production people and look at what goes on, but with software, there's never really any need.

Yes, I’m aware that software isn’t real engineering.

49" 32:9 display. I can never go back.

Do you just never use maximized windows with a 32:9? With 3 smaller 16:9s I have one window active in each of them, but you must have a way of aligning multiple windows on one screen to use all that space

Yeah, I typically go with two windows. Apparently if I just drag a window to the edge, it snaps to filling the left or right half of the screen. Seems to be built into Windows 10. I installed PowerToys that has even more advanced options for window partitioning, but I haven't found I need it. My monitor actually came with some Samsung branded utilities for the same, but I found them actually more annoying than the default(?) Windows behavior.

I was going to mention Win+Left/Right if aquota didn't. It's great for snapping to the inner side of a two monitor setup. But I suppose you don't really need that feature.

pro tip, windows key + left/right arrow key has the same effect as dragging all the way to the side. If you continue to hold the windows key after doing this you can then hit the up or down arrow to quarter the window.

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