Not picking on you personally, but there sure are a lot of dumb ass conspiracy theories on a thread about critical thinking.

The purpose of the neurological changes that take place in a teenagers brain seems to be in part to inspire rebellion against their parents to the point where they flee the nest, once the rebellion succeeds grandchildren bring relative harmony for a decade or more.

Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.

The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.

In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.

Yes, the very nature of large organisations drains initiative, males in particular evolved to work in small groups of 5-6 and live in tribes of ~150 people, anyone not in their tribe was by definition "sub-human" but not necessarily a mortal enemy. A wise organisation acknowledges this and will give small teams a great deal of autonomy to achieve a particular goal, eg: think how the military would tackle the goal of "keep the park tidy and well maintained", you may have to explain to them that anyone can use the park, but you get the idea.

Disclaimer: I spent seven years in the 90's as technical lead on an automated job dispatch system that handled thousand of workers and tens of thousands of jobs each day, it covered the continent of Australia, at that time it was by far the largest mobile dispatch system in the southern hemisphere in volume of work and geographical coverage. The backend used "linear programming" techniques (WW2 logistics), no human could beat the daily work plan it churned out. A bunch of execs would get up at 5am and paw all over the plan, add some "special constraints" and end up with a less efficient solution. Often the "special constraints" were accepted anyway, since - we can't have (say) the telecoms minister waiting 2 days for a new install in his office, it has to be done first thing today, and it has to be done by employee X who drinks at the same pub, who gives a flying fuck if 25 nobodys drop off the original work plan?

> Because we never had people trying to wipe us out before Muslims came along...

Were you trying to be funny? The Muslims have been trying to conquer Europe for a very long time. If anything, the last couple of centuries is just a temporary lull. They have been at this pretty much since their religion was founded.

"before Muslims came long" gets back to about 700AD.

ONE person dies and they go full retard? WTF? This was one guy with a gun. It's no reason to engage in national hysterics. They have managed to outdo us in US by a country mile.

I'm 55, the phrase has been around for a long time, Carl Sagan was fond of it (unfortunately my HS never mentioned it) so it wasn't until I dropped out and saw Sagan and Randi talking about it on TV that I became personally aware that it was a skill that can be taught. Perhaps it's been hijacked lately in the US to mean something else but I haven't noticed. To me it has always meant 'skepticism', in particular self-skepticism. Sagan also referred to it as his "bullshit detection kit". As for TFA, memorising facts* is essential but insufficient, ie: you can't even start to think about things that you don't remember, which is what Newton was getting at with his "shoulders of giants" comment.

*Facts as in - "two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them", that the force is ~9.8m/s on Earth's surface is trivia, handy to know but not essential to the concept that's being memorised since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong. Of course there are exceptions where memorising numbers is a useful "short-cut" for the student, multiplication tables being the most obvious

> I don't use Windows because I'm "forced to", I use it because it works well, everything runs on it, it supports just about everything in the PC business, and its cost is so low, it might as well be free.

I have known plenty of people that use Windows because they think they are forced into it. This idea goes all the way back to the 80s.

They would still think that way if not for tablets. Tablets look just different enough to the untrained eye to get people off of their "must be DOS compatible" fixation.

That wedge helps undermine the longstanding FUD that average people need to run WinDOS so they can run unecessarily bloated applications that are really meant for professional secretaries.

Windows is still a malware magnet. This is enough of a motivation for "average people" to seek out alternatives.

> If lowering the price to $0 doesn't work, you can only point fingers at yourself.

Yeah. It's not like there are no other factors involved like a 30 year entrenched monopoly or zero companies that are doing any real marketing for the product or the fact that the company that "does everything right" can't manage to get past 10% market share.

Although none of that really matters. I just care about the AAA titles that play as well (or better) on Linux as they do on Windows. I don't have to put up with an inferior monopoly product just to play a cool game.

If Gabe feeling threatened by Microsoft can cause the 20+ year association between WinDOS and games to shatter then that's a win for all of us.

I know gamers that would dump Windows tomorrow if they could.

...and this is all fine so long as you apply the approved checklist.

> They do the same thing over again and expect something completely different to happen.

That's the perfect megacorp employee. They just need to follow the checklist and all is good. A critical thinker might question the checklist and that would be considered very bad.

If this were from some rag in Silicon Valley, it would be less absurd. The companies in that area actually do need real employees rather than trained monkeys.

The idea that the Wall Street Journal and the corporations they represent are worried about "critical thinking skills" is just laughable. Those kinds of corporations actively discourage independent thinking. They want everyone to be a trained monkey so that they can devalue your labor and replace you easily.

The LAST thing they want are people with hard to replace cognitive skills or tribal knowledge.

They want COGS.

Indie games were already being made for Linux before Steam came along. Legacy games were also available. They're a non-moving target, so they are relatively easy address with wine or dosbox.

It's the AAA titles where the real gap was.

This is something else for the mothership to sell to the individual franchisees. As others have stated, the structure of McDonalds is such that the master corporation really has no reason to be concerned what the minimum wage is. This is only a consideration for the individual restaurants.

Those can just as easily be put out of business by the mothership at any time for any reason.

Just jack up the price of buns.

"That's a good thing".....for the hyper-dominant side.

BTW "Modern full scale combat" is a nuclear holocaust, and yes, it would almost certainly put an end to human conflict forever.

20K+ battles in world of tanks, one life per battle. Why anyone would WANT to play for real is beyond me.