Children are incapable of deception until they are about 3 years old.

That assertion is incorrect, as another commenter has posted. Although anecdotal, my youngest grandaughter is not even 2 and has been recently caught a couple of times trying to manipulate her mom or dad into giving her attention at a moment's notice by sometimes pretending to be hurt when she was not. Being only a year and a half old, she's not particularly adept at such deception (so bad at it. in fact, that it's almost funny), but it's still quite definitely a form of lying, even if it is mostly non-verbal.

On the subject of apes, I've suggested that somebody should really try teaching an ape to read beyond the scope of a parlor trick where it is simply doing it to satisfy some immediate physiological need or desire, and hopes that by performing said stunt, it will induce its owner or keeper into giving it such a reward. The ultimate test of reading comprehension would be when it can learn entirely new skills by reading about how to perform them instead of being trained by somebody else. The new skills do not necessarily have to be complex, nor do they necessarily have to be performed expertly, but if they were able to read, they should at least know the mechanical and cognitive steps involved in the task, and be able to make what are readily observable attempts at performing them, and also be able to realize when they are not following such steps. For example, could an ape learn to play a simple count-and-capture game such as Mancala by reading the rules, even if the ape had never been taught the game by a human? A six-year old child can learn to play such a game by reading the rules (not necessarily very well, but the child will still know the rules of the game and competently demonstrate an ability to follow them even without having been instructed how to play by anyone else). If chimpanzees or other similar apes are so cognitively similar to humans, it seems to me that this should be possible.

Also... arguing that some humans can't read or write is drawing on exceptions rather than the rule when a person has been raised in an environment where that education is actually provided.

Whole societies have existed without writing, true, but you could take almost child who was born in that society and provide them with a proper education, and statistically speaking, have a fairly good chance of being able to teach that child to read and write by age 6 or 7, barring any developmental disabilities that might impede it (which are the exception and not the rule anyways). How poor the family might be, or how many generations back the family has been illiterate is entirely irrelevant to how quickly the child might be able to learn the skill.

My point being that the human mind, at least generally speaking, is sophisticated enough to be able to learn something like this by a relatively young age. Why, if some primates are so cognitively similar to humans, can they not be trained to do likewise? And if they are not so cognitively similar, then why is that being presented as an argument that animals should be treated like persons in the first place?

Such developmental disability is the exception and not the rule.. p. Also, where did I say anything about sign language? I asked about reading and writing.... and in particular, using such skills to meaningfully communicate original thoughts and ideas as well as learn how to do things they didn't used to know how to do.

Of course not, but you are drawing on the exception, rather than the rule.

The point remains... most children can be successfully taught to read.... and you didn't even try to answer the question.

Can someone explain to me why none of the great apes that supposedly share so much with humans in terms of cognitive ability can be taught how to read and to write, not merely as a parlor trick that the creature utilizes so that it will receive some reward that might satisfy an immediate physiological craving such as hunger, but as a technique that the animal might use to communicate its own thoughts and ideas to others (can an ape write a creative story with a beginning, middle, and end, for example?), and in particular, be able to teach this ability to successive generations of apes who may then even surpass the ability of their own instructor? An ape that could read could then teach itself how to do many more things than what it currently knows simply by reading about them, rather than having to be explicitly instructed by someone else... it could learn the rules to a game like chess, for example.

Practically any human being can typically be taught how to read and to write by the time they are six or seven if the education is available to them. Can somebody tell me what, if anything, is so unique about the human mind that no other creature on the planet can be taught this?

The money you can save each month on gas doesn't mean squat when the difference in monthly payments on the cost of an electric car vs a conventional vehicle of similar size can often be more than what you'd spend on gasoline. You can mitigate the issue by extending the duration of the car loan to lower monthly payments, but long-period loans on something like a car doesn't tend to make a whole lot of financial sense.

Also, the effective daily range really needs to go up on most EV's.... (that is, how far you could reasonably expect to be able to go in one day, including any time spent recharging, travelling in absolutely any direction that there are roads in the first place). Sure the range on EV's right now is practical for about 90% of all driving, but when that bloody 10% is going to be a recurring problem, you still feel like you need to have a regular car at your disposal too. But not everyone has the luxury of being able to have two cars... one for commuting and the other for longer trips, especially if they are paying more money for the electric car in the first place.

When EV makers can make a vehicle that is actually priced on parity with what you'd spend on a conventional engine car of similar size plus the cost of gasoline, I will start to consider it... when they can allow me to go absolutely anywhere I want to, and drive a thousand km in a day if I want to, including time spent stopping for a recharge, and not charge me a premium of more than double what I could spend on a conventional engine car of similar size and otherwise comparable style (I'm looking at you, Tesla), then sign me up.

... are they suggesting it should eventually become illegal for people to simply *remember* anything embarrassing that somebody else did when they were kids?

That'd really be a downer for "open mike" at weddings, where opportunities to embarrass the bride and groom abound.

All that remains are the employees who either lack the confidence in their skills to feel that they are employable elsewhere... or those employees who lack the skills.

While I can certainly see how the first one would happen, if one actually lacks the skills to do their job, then shouldn't they have been fired already? Not being productive enough *is* a reason to let someone go.

Apparently dressing well improves the holistic ambiance of a brain struggling with esoteric things like coding.

With fertilizer like that, I'm sure their lawns are looking great in spite of the drought. On a scale of 1 to 10 on the shittitude meter, that's probably like a 12 or 13.

Javascript's eval can be very useful in general, and in fact, the most useful form of it is when you *are* invoking it on dynamically generated code that simply cannot be as concisely expressed in any other way. That's not to say it's impossible, but it can often be a darn sight more convoluted to not use eval in Javascript to get a particular job done than it would be to write it using statically compilable code. Some may argue that this is a flaw in the design of the language itself, but I would personally be reluctant to quickly discard the feature entirely simply because of its potential for abuse in this particular way. I would suggest that there are almost certainly other ways to achieve the desired ends, but they most probably involve much more complex intermediate goals.

Blocking eval itself isn't generally a solution anyways, since javascript within the browser could invoke 'document write' to place additional code into the page where it is executing, and then simply directly call a function that it dynamically added to the page using such a technique to achieve the exact same thing as what could be done using eval.

I suspect the longer term solution is for browsers to sandbox javascript pretty tightly.... malicious code that detects such sandboxing as an attempt to evade detection as such may not get detected by the browser as problematic, but still won't be able to accomplish anything because it will still be inside of the sandbox, and when the code tries to do something that is prohibited, it can be immediately flagged at that time rather than just trying to detect it at page load time.