I agree a lot with this. Some folks really do hoard pointless things, but for most people a lot of their stuff really consists of things you'd expect to be in a household, but rarely use. It doesn't usually make sense to get rid of these things pre-emptively because you're still likely to use them as long as you're in that living situation, even if it's infrequent.
Then when you pass away and other people have to go through it all, they don't need those items because their household already has those items. I don't need 3 more flashlights and a kitchen table because I already have my own!
I agree a lot with your point on Minecraft. The farther you explore and the more you see, the higher the bar feels for what's worth your interest.
When you first start playing the game, a medium sized mountain is exciting. Then the bar raises towards more interesting features (a deep canyon or a village), and then towards really interesting features of land. Finally, you look for obscure biomes (e.g. badlands or ice spikes). By the end, you can go thousands of blocks without seeing something that feels worth exploring.
Luckily Minecraft has other aspects beyond just the exploration.
There's the Kerbal Space Program approach, where space exploration is tough and you need to learn a LOT to succeed at it. The tradeoff of this is a high sense of accomplishment, where simply landing and returning from another body feels like you did something incredible.
There's also the Outer Wilds approach, where the story carries it. Moving around isn't hard at all, but you have specific goals to accomplish that move you towards a final ending. Diversity in how you accomplish those goals makes it feel fresh.
Mass Effect is similar, where you have some freedom to explore, but it's again in the pursuit of this broader story. So exploration feels like a rich side quest more than the main point of the task.
I agree with this. People buy a place to live usually because they like the qualities of that place. Changes to those qualities affect their day to day experience, whereas changes to their primary residence value usually only materialize when they need to access that value.
To me the issue is that densification (in the US; can't speak to other countries) usually comes with more downsides than upsides.
Mainly this is because of the US's focus on cars: the biggest downside is usually increased traffic. Unfortunately it feels towns in the US do the bare minimum to address it, like adding some traffic lights and maybe a lane or two.
Instead I wish the US had more good examples of densification for existing residents, where along with the increased housing larger steps were made to improve the community. E.g. significantly expanded mass transit, bicycling infrastructure, community third places, etc. And I get it, these things are really expensive and hard to do. But turning densification into something that more clearly benefits the day-to-day experience of existing residents would do a LOT to combat NIMBYism.
Most of my courses were very "Point A" to "Point B". You're given a set of formulae, then a problem, then you use some combinations of those formulae to solve the problem. Most labs were the same way: you're given an exact script to follow without any explanation of the experiment design. It felt like both were optimized for easy instruction / grading and not for learning new skills or concepts.
Only two of the courses I took were substantially different. One was an upper division lab that actually was more open-ended, where we were given a goal and some equipment and had to figure out how to use the equipment to meet the goal. Another was a more conceptual course where we explored how to approach broad problems to come up with rough estimates for a wide variety of questions. Both were much more engaging, but I saw many students good at the typical course type struggle with how open ended these courses were.
Thinking more about this, I feel a good solution might be to let students decide whether they want to keep the first semester letter grades once they receive them, or simplify them down to a pass/no-pass.
That way there's still an incentive to do good work, and students who do well still get to receive the benefit of keeping the letter grade. Students who do poorly receive the letter grade as feedback, but have a one-off chance to reduce the impact and try again the next semester.
On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once.
On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier.
I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
I think there's a way to make it work. If you do poorly first semester, you go on academic probation and must improve by your second semester or you are suspended for the next fall. If you successfully get off academic probation at the end of second semester, you can drop those freshman fall grades. Same with suspension but either way, you must have one successful semester under your belt to drop that first semester.
I did really well my freshman year and managed to get deans list. Then I transfered to a much more rigorous school and didn't do well. I didn't enjoy my major, I was living in a house far from campus with three other guys I didn't know and didn't really have any shared interests with. By spring, I was on academic probation. I lived like a hermit and wasn't going to class much or studying hard. I was pretty depressed and my undiagnosed ADHD didn't help. I did have some highschool friends at that school but I hadn't seen them in a while so it was hard making the effort to see them. I got on academic suspension at the end of my second year and had to take my next fall off. I waited the whole summer until I had come back to school to tell my parents because I was so ashamed. I remember my dad was trying to figure out why he hadn't gotten a tuition bill yet and called the bursar office while we were at the beach in August. They couldn't say why he hadn't gotten a bill yet so he handed the phone to me and the lady on the other end is saying "you need to tell them you're suspended." That was a gut punch. I was actually suicidal at this point but I kept it together until I wrote them a long email saying how bad things were. My dad visited me and convinced me to see a therapist. This ended up getting me an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I stayed in my room a lot of that suspended fall semester but I did join a club sport (while lying about my eligibility as a full time student) which lead to making some friends. When I came back the next spring semester under a new major, I felt ready to crush it and I did. I stayed for the summer and crushed some more classes. I moved in with a friend and got along great with those guys. I was also right next to campus so there was no excuse to missing classes. I met my wife and made a huge turn around. But, those grades from my sophmore year were an albatross around my neck. They ruined my GPA. My in-major GPA was decent but I was still graduating with a 2.6 (freshman year grades didn't apply since they were transfer credits). Luckily, my parents had helped me get internships and my wife's father got me in for an interview at my current employer so GPA wasn't a huge burden to employment.
I really wish I could have dropped any of those sophmore grades. Obviously this policy wouldn't have helped me but I can certainly understand how it could help.
Small clarification: the post's screenshot is of the News mode in Search, and not news.google.com. I think the latter is what people think of when they think "Google News". Whether the same problems are there as well, I don't know.
I also notice in the screenshot that the query isn't visible, it's on page 4 of results, and there seems to be a banner saying that the search is expanding beyond the set filters. I agree it certainly shouldn't ignore the date filter, but otherwise depending on the query we might already have exhausted useful results by page 4.
I think the critique of "the search tool no longer respects your settings" is true regardless of it it notifies you of that fact. I did a random search myself and the first result outside of one week I saw was on page 17[1]. There are still lots of results within the one-week limit and that remains true for at least 10 more pages. I also do not see any banner warning me that my search has been expanded.
So while I think google news may still be generally useful, I also think the complaints in this article are accurate based on the first search I checked.
I didn’t read the article but now the headline makes more sense. I use google news, the website and mobile app, daily and don’t have any complaints. It’s been the same and perfectly fine for as long as I can remember.
What a joke of a journalist. I'm all for shitting over Google, but have some competence and integrity!
This has a captivating headline and we've all seen the depredations in Google and elsewhere, but this is journalistic malpractice. It's not Google News, Search tells you when it is abandoning your filters because you keep infinite paginating, he intentionally cropped the screenshot as much as he could to make it as sensational as possible.
Mr. Elgan, you say this is in the "huge majority" of the time. I demand receipts. Show me just one more example, uncropped, with the full URL.
I have a family member who's a lobbyist. When he talks about his job, a common theme is that a huge amount of his work is trying assess the impacts of policy on businesses (albeit mainly big businesses) and make sure lawmakers are able to take that into consideration. I don't know how well that represents lobbying as a whole, but that part always made sense and didn't seem like a bribe.
Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.
My ex worked at Congress for a few years so I got a little bit of view on the inside. There are a lot of lobbyists who do honest work and try to present correct data. Same for politicians. A lot of them (most?) really want to do a good job and make the country better. But, like in corporations, it's the psychopaths that only care for their own benefit and nothing else, who make it to the top and get to make the big decisions.
My ex was around when they worked on Obamacare. There were a lot of really good ideas floating around that had broad buy-in but then the super partisans and corrupt (say Lieberman and Baucus) destroyed it and created a big, but profitable for some, mess.
And with the increased spending after Citizens United it's only going to get worse.
Does this really demonstrate what the author thinks it does? Other than menus, none of this was really easier before technology.
- Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early.
- Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well.
Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios.
Then when you pass away and other people have to go through it all, they don't need those items because their household already has those items. I don't need 3 more flashlights and a kitchen table because I already have my own!
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