Sorry for not responding to this faster, but I had to order the book and read it thoroughly. At the time of my previous response I had only read excerpts.

You seem to think that I'm against the 5-paragraph essay. I'm not. The 5-paragraph essay has its uses and teaching concise communication seems appropriate to me. I'm against the 5-paragraph essay as a writing PRODUCT. The end result of writing (IMO) should be communication; not 5 paragraphs, not 7 sentences, not a concluding paragraph that says, "in conclusion...", but an actual transmission of thought.

There are over 460,000 words in the English language. My opinion about teaching using only the Ogden Basic English comes from my desire to see people master the skills of communication. And that is what writing is; a skill. If you are learning to golf, you start out with only 3 clubs in your bag. After you learn the basics you expand your quantity of tools. The same is true of learning martial arts (limited basics called kihon), tennis, watercolor painting, and many other skills.

I like the idea of using E-Prime later on, because it forms communication with direct descriptions for the relationships between subject and verb. Once a person can clearly distinguish those relationships, they can move on to creating artful communication. The process of learning a skill is the experience of going from "awkward, awkward, awkward" to "mechanical, mechanical, mechanical", and on to "elegant, elegant, elegant".

So I'm not saying that appropriate experiences should be overlooked. I'm saying that the desired goal is creative and artful output by the doer. Musicians must learn scales and proper body control before they can produce artful music, and writers must learn those equivalent and analogous skills to produce artful writing.

The problem for writing English is the same as for programming; It is based on the assumption that you can "manufacture" people with proper skills. The 5-paragraph essay and other "rules" included in English writing instruction are mostly conventions so that the "quality control" people (read, "teachers") can spot deficiencies without stressing themselves.

C. K. Ogden, co-author of, "The Meaning of Meaning," constructed a form of "Basic English" on the proposition that a person could communicate anything using his 850 words. If I was teaching writing, especially non-fiction, for the first two months I would limit my students to using only Ogden's vocabulary. Then for the next month I would allow them to increase their vocabulary as long as they only used E-Prime. Only then would I allow them to explore the possibility of writing like John McPhee, Charles Petzold, Robert Hutchins, or other exceptional non-fiction writers.

BTW, after learning to communicate precisely, the Random House "Word Menu" is a great tool for creating more interesting writing. https://www.amazon.com/Random-...

Think on this: What if the order you watched the episodes changed the content of the subsequent episodes? Would you have to start over again and make different choices in your order?

What if the order you watched the episodes changed the content of the episodes you already watched?

These questions are important to many different disciplines such as Biology, Economics, Mathematics, Robotics, and many, many more.

I usually recommend two books that touch on the subject: For Economics I recommend, "The Origin of Wealth" by Beinhocker https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077... . It is very readable and will stretch the mind. For Technology I recommend, "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly. It is also very readable, and will also stretch your mind https://kk.org/kevinkelly/out-... . I recommend the PDF version because Kelly added more illustrations, annotations and footnotes.

In Economics, Frederich Hayek proved, back in about 1929, that this type of complexity made true command and control Economics implausible, and probably impossible. Marxists, Socialists and Stafford Beer (before he bankrupted Chile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , should have taken notice.

In the last 3 months I have seen this exact technique described and reported in 6 different books on Psychology and persuasion.

The technique, sometimes called "voting report card" depends on the assumption that people can be "nudged" into "responsible" behavior by adjusting the ways in which they are given choices, either through policy or environment. Although the book, "Nudge" by Richard Thaler https://www.amazon.com/Nudge-I... advocates a more free choice approach to shaping peoples' behavior, it can easily be abused, especially if the targets are somewhat vulnerable. Thaler's work has influenced many authors who write books on self-discipline and personal achievement. An example of where it is being used to great effect is in the UK, in what is referred to as the "Nudge Unit" https://www.amazon.com/Think-S... . This unit has also done some successful consulting in the USA. The book, "Think Small" is a pretty good introduction and a very interesting read.

But what then? Let's suppose you are able to get an additional 10% of the voting population to vote: Is that good or bad? Are these people qualified to vote? (Eligible, yes. Qualified, who knows?) In over 40 years of asking I've only found 2 people (who were not lawyers) who knew the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States of America. The majority of the US population is woefully ignorant about US History and Economics https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007... . Most of them (WARNING! GENERALIZATION ALERT!) are unable to recognize and adjust their thinking to the 22 main rhetorical fallacies. Are we a more free country when we let idiots vote?

It can get complicated, but Scientists have known for years that there is a price to be paid, somewhere, for the apparent benefits of "free energy".

It is virtually impossible to calculate ALL the costs in providing wind and solar power.Do you start with the costs of mining the materials needed to produce the components of a wind generator? Wait! How about starting with the costs of producing the machinery that mine those elements? No, that doesn't take into account the lab time and personnel needed to come up with the idea in the first place...etc., etc. I found the articles on the IEEE Spectrum page very interesting. the articles have rotated off the page but are still searchable. There are many smaller articles in the series. Here's one: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ener...

If someone has found a better and more efficient way to do their job, they deserve a promotion, added responsibilities, better perks, and certainly a raise in pay.

I see two problems: First, some companies see their employees as cogs in a machine rather than capital contributors to the community. Second, some people see themselves as cogs in a machine rather than contributors to the common good.

If I found an employee leeching off the company, I'd give them a month to document what they did. I'd pay them double for that month, and sue them if they didn't do it. Either way, they would be looking for a new job.

As a person who's been doing UNIX since 1984, ATT SVR3.2 was my favorite, although I've used other variants. I'm tired of Linux crap. I'm tired of systemd and the systemd wars. I'm tired of having to learn nuanced differences in various distros just to do basic, common, tasks. I'm tired of package repositories that suck when it comes to good maintenance (although they are still better than rpm hell). I'm tired of half-baked security measures that are badly designed and beyond human understanding. (IMO, admin should be a straight-forward set of tasks where doing one thing doesn't break 10 others.)

I'd rather move to seL4 and have to write drivers for the few things that I use which aren't totally implemented yet. Luckily, I am old enough that I don't have to work for anyone who doesn't agree with me, and I still have skills current enough to make the change for me and my clients.

Linux is going to drown in its own sh*t.

Capitalism and Socialism don't exist! These words are not nouns; they are labels, and they are grossly generalized labels at that!

It is all right to argue the merits of generalizations (philosophers do it all the time), but before you can start the comparison you must have an agreement on exactly what those terms mean.

Do you want to have some fun this week? Just go around asking your friends and acquaintances, "What is Capitalism?" or, "What is Socialism?" or even, "What is 'Capital'?" They may never forgive you, but it will be amusing.

Frederick Bastiat included a parable in his book, "Economic Sophisms" about candlemakers trying to outlaw the sun and require everyone to close their shutters during the day because the sun represented unfair competition and deprived the candlemakers of their just living.

You would think it couldn't hapen in today's society, but here is a prime example. Add to that the legislation proposed by various states to protect the utilities from the unfair competition of solar power (actually enacted in Oklahoma), and various other examples, and you can see that economic education is sorely lacking in many places. Have we made no progress since 1845?

If Veerhoeven thinks "Starshiop Troopers" is about Fascism, then I contend that he probably can't tell the difference between Fascism and a funnel.

After seeing the movie, I decided to read the book again; something I hadn't done since the '70's. Although I had read all of Heinlein's books a number of times, I had forgotten how controversial this book was when it first came out. It was a strongly worded allegory exploring the duties of a citizen to the nation that he belonged to, and the only nod to that concept in the movie was the sideways allusion to the populace as mostly parasites who were neither capable nor responsible enough to participate in government. Edmund Burke (no relation) said that political power ought only to be exercised by patriots with intelligence, education and leisure. Today, Patriotism and Education are lacking in a general populace with too much leisure and questionable intelligence. (Eaten any Tide pods lately?)

Today, Heinlein would probably be considered a Libertarian. Back when he wrote the book he was simply a patriotic American. I'm not surprised if the book was too deep for Hollywood.

I'm almost 70. I started programming on IBM 1401 computers doing cryptography for the US Army in 1965. I used an assembly language called AUTOCODER. I had an old cup-type modem that I'd transmit Hollerith cards' data over the AUTODIN network. (pre-Arpanet; like a military WATS line) I think it is funny that after 52 years, I'm still doing what the Army vocational tests said I was suited for; Communications and Computers. I have been involved in projects that built the foundations for a LOT of the stuff that is being developed today. Today's programmers pick off-the-shelf components built on algorithms me and my contemporaries developed in the '60's and '70's.

Today's programming environment is not built for someone of my personality type. Today when I program I only do short projects, and almost never team projects. I escaped the "electronic sweatshop" in 1994, so I no longer have to sweat over whether I will have a place in the project every three months, and I don't have to work in the day and then get up at night to teach some twerp in India how to program his application. I could spend the rest of my life taking on projects like I see on Hackaday. I only do what's interesting to me. I experiment in Robotics and AI, and I LOVE doing Math applications in spreadsheets. I don't take any projects that don't pay me what I think I'm worth (billing rate = $1200 per day) and I try to keep my projects down to 5 days per month or less so I have time for my own stuff. I also get to reject projects that require me to conform to requirements that don't make sense to me. I would rather create a small, WORKABLE app in LiveCode than do something complicated in Java or Perl. I prefer assembly-language programming, but I have skills in C/C++ (Java, etc..), LISP (Scheme, Racket, Haskell), and I like playing with other languages (I like Python a lot, Ruby not as much, and I'm doing a lot of exporting some of my C programs to Rust.) But today, a person can't just be a "programmer". I have bounced back and forth from Software to Administration to Sales and done this many times. You become an "IT Professional" rather than "Programmer".

Of course, I don't live at the same high level I did when I was in the "electronic sweatshop". Sometimes I wish I had more money. Occasionally I see something I'd like to do for others that would actually pay me a salary, and it sounds like I would get some security. The latest was to do tech support for programmers writing in Perl. ("Software reliability" is an oxymoron; programmers need a support team that understands complex Math and Logic.) Luckily, because of my age, I get turned down for most of these things before I get sucked in.

So, while many of my friends my age have invested thousands of dollars in their garage shops and build birdhouses, I have a whole world of workshop on my computers that I can use to make cool things. Go for the creativity! Make those projects you always wanted to make! Pick up a job at a bookstore if you need money, but set aside plenty of time to make something with a long shelf life.

....nobody would ever go back to the site.

I would have brought up the distinction between "professional" and "competent" but someone beat me to it.

However, neither of these labels have a specific meaning. How do you know if a programmer is "competent"? It is easier to tell if a programmer is incompetent, but the line between the two states is fuzzy, particularly since the competency criteria depend on context such as specific languages, specific hardware, and purpose of the software. An assembly language programmer may be perfectly competent or even excellent in a robotics factory, yet be totally incapable of applying the requisite skills for accounting software where the development language is Java or C++.

And "professional" implies a common set of standards. This type of standardization is totally missing in programming field, which has retained its "craft industry" cachet for multiple generations.

If I were responsible for bringing up a new generation of programmers, I would spend a LOT of time identifying specific criteria, and then prioritizing those criteria before I even addressed the content and skills necessary.

The poster is correct: A pay gap does not exist if men and women are receiving equal pay for similar work. Studies starting as early as 1973 show that women without children, continuously employed for 17 or more years, in the USA, actually made MORE than men with the same criteria.

What creates the gap in income is that women make choices about taking time off for their kids, having children, spending more family time, and preferring less stressful or demanding jobs. Women seem to respond to quality-of-life enhancement over income enhancement.

Pay is generally given (in the jobs market) based on the perceived contribution. A woman who has been out of her field for 4 or 5 years cannot usually contribute as much as another employee (man or woman) who has been continuously engaged and is up-to-date. That woman will re-enter the job market at a lower rate, which then becomes the new starting point for future increased pay.

OK, one of the criteria is "in the USA". Conditions are different outside the USA, and the report may be correct for those countries.

And remember: "Women" don't earn income; "individual women" earn income. Statistics based on averages can be skewed in many different ways, and maany of these create useless results.

Well, I started out with a triple major in Physics, Math and Computer Science, but eventually dropped out for a while and became a Hippie. I didn't actually pick up my Physics from the Principia, but I did go to a Jesuit University and actually had to read it. I cannot adequately express how valuable this book has been to me.

Dean Kamen dropped out of school, went to the library, studied Newton's Principia, and went on to be an awesome inventor and thinker.

Eli Goldratt used the thinking processes in the Principia to turn USA manufacturing and business methods on their respective heads. Read his books, "The Goal", "It's not Luck" and "Critical Chain" for some really interesting examples of thinking. He wrote a terrific book, "The Choice" https://www.amazon.com/Choice-... which clearly describes how useful Newton's methods are.