So as an engineer, you fail to see the utility in reading and writing comprehension (beyond the remedial level necessary to participate in society). Color me surprised. As an English major, I failed to see the utility in learning Calculus, so I didn't. At this point in life 20+ years on, I wish I had - not for a career change but because I feel incomplete as a human, that there's a whole realm of knowledge that's basically lost to me, that I can only learn so much about the sciences and even pure mathematics that I fine extremely interesting, right up to the point that I can no longer follow along with the equations and it turns into the rest of the popsci episode of Nova when they start showing closeups of a string quartet to get us plebes to understand how string theory works. And I'm not about to re-learn all of the mathemetics I forgot 20 years ago, I have limited time in my life and there are things I do want to learn and do more. It just would have been nice if I had.

Now, a "book report" or an "essay" might seem useless to you at the time, or even now, since you're not really using those skills, but there are plenty of ways you do use those skills in everyday life. Media literacy, for one thing, applies to everyone - and that's not something that comes naturally, in fact media illiteracy is the default state of humanity based on how easy it is to be Influenced by a fucking 30 second video. If you don't ever sit down with a piece of media - not even fiction, try a politician's speech, a policy paper, or perhaps a sermon from a religious leader, stuff like job training, or, yes, that 25 minute conspiracy-ridden clickbait YouTube video your mom/child/spouse *needs* you to see - and have a few hours of hard thinking, looking past the surface level to see the ideologies, philosophy, artistry (or sophistry), and intention behind them, followed by someone calling you out on your thoughts about them, then you're just sleepwalking your way through life.

Why does it have to be about Romeo & Juliet? Because it's helpful to have a universal piece of work to criticize. You can look up other perspectives about it. From a teacher's point of view, they don't have time to read two dozen books so we've settled on that one as a pretty standard text that almost everyone in the English speaking world will have gone though by the time they're an adult. Necro-pedophilic trash? Oh, how original, but still, if she thinks that, then she should be able to explain why, using examples, and try to persuade the teacher that her viewpoint is defensible and a valid interpretation of a 500 year old play in the 2020s. And if she gets in trouble for it, you can show up and defend her and it'd do wonders for your relationship and her confidence.

20 years into my career, I've never had to do math beyond Excel formulas for budgets. Why should we learn advanced math when that's *definitely* going to be done better by AI? When kids can just "know the concepts" magically somehow and know what to ask it to do for them and that's just as good? Kids using AI to write for them don't even know what they don't know, and that's the big issue here.

That's totally backwards. You get, what, 3-4 hours a week to have a lecture and in-class discussion with a PhD level educator and you think that time would be better spent having him watch them take quizzes? They don't use in-class time for reading, they use it for a structured explanation and discussion of the material that they just read or will just read, and if you're reading multiple sources, a demonstration of how you can take aspects of both and combine them, or how one informs the other, or even how two diametrically opposed sources can teach you better than two that have the same method or viewpoint.

The professor can throw in random references, historical context, and insights that simplify material or explanations that break down a complicated subject into something easier to comprehend as part of a structured plan that will build up a particular area of understanding over dozens of classes, as opposed to an AI that will spit out a one-page explanation of a concept pulled from who knows what sources that might be completely hallucinating a key point that students aren't equipped to notice, and in any case might generate "insights" that are totally irrelevant and unhelpful to the overall educational program while deluding the student that they've done "enough" of the learning to get by.

It's also hard if not impossible to adequately judge learning based on in-class hand-written finals with no electronic devices. Especially once you get out of 101 level classes with 500 students. It's a tremendous waste of time and money to make a professor do the job of a teaching assistant and sit around watching a bunch of teenagers write in blue books.

We don't need to ruin students' educational prospects for the sake of their own convenience. They need to learn how to learn, because if they don't, they're gonna in be in trouble later on.

Well, yes. It has always been easier for white people to register and vote. They don't put obstacles to voting up in rich suburban neighborhoods and rural jurisdictions. Also, voting demographics have always skewed older, so more registered voters are old. So the pool of unregistered voters, whether through malice or apathy, always tends toward Democratic demographics. They'll register Republicans in these campaigns because they'll still register more Democrats overall - it would put some people off if it was nakedly tilted against registering Republicans. But much like people don't consider White or Male to be a race or a sex, because they've historically been the default POV/main actors in most of this country's histories - at least the ones they teach - and media going back hundreds of years, the "average voter" (in terms of actual registration) is white and usually male. They're mostly registered already; it's the people at the margins who can't take the day off work to go vote (you're technically allowed to, but sometimes you just can't for money or family reasons) because there's one polling place for their district halfway across down because their gerrymandered district is shaped like a bowl of spaghetti fell on the floor and the secretary of state assigned the same voting budget to every geographic region, never minding that the suburb of 10000 and inner city of 80,000 have different needs, who haven't registered and don't intend to vote.

Think DST is tough? There's a rare condition out there called Non-24 sleep/wake disorder. It's where a body's circadian rhythm is not, in fact, 24 hours like the rest of the human race, generally closer to 25 hours or similar. That's essentially DST every single day. I actually use DST to explain it to people - you'd hate it if every day your body was one hour off. In two weeks, your natural "wake up time" would be 6 pm instead of 6 am, then a week later it would be 1 am. And it's not just a sleep-related issue - the circadian rhythm affects EVERYTHING, like your immune system, your cardiovascular system, your digestion, everything. You can't fight your circadian rhythm forever; there is no way to stay on the same daytime/nighttime schedule as everyone else - and unlike graveyard shift workers, you never get to acclimate, and there's not enough caffeine in the world. I know someone who has it - the only thing that really helped was either one-time doses of Ritalin for a few hours of mental boost, or a drug developed by the military to keep soldiers awake called Provigil, which is also not a everyday solution.

Most of the people that have it are blind, with damaged eyes - the theory is it is caused when melanopsin receptors in your eyes. Just like rods and cones, you have special cells in your eyes that are sensitive to daylight and send signals to your brain to regulate your melatonin (sleep hormone). There's a drug, Hetlioz, that is like an antidepressant for melatonin that is used to treat it in blind people. But there are some truly unfortunate people out there with sight who have it too, for unknown reasons, and it doesn't work for them.

Circadian rhythms are not something to fuck around with.

You can outsource tech workers too, I'm sure they're exactly as good everywhere around the world because the tools to learn are all out there for anyone, all you need is a free language and a "pay what you want" humble bundle and you too can write your own app with enough practice.

A massive marketing effort goes into even middlingly successful artists. If you have to fire up the machinery every month, you're going to burn people out - they just won't care. For established artists, albums are an event - a catalyst around which 6 months of interviews, touring, promo videos, and other marketing are planned. There are people who can drop a new single every couple months, but it really depends on the genre and audience - if your audience is adults, they won't have time for your shit if you try to grab their attention 8 times a year. But if you just release a stream of singles, nobody is going to remember to check them out by the third one.

When there's SO MUCH competition out there, you can't afford to hamstring all your promotional efforts, burn yourself out on a constant treadmill, and alienate your fans.

One of my favorite bands - one that I've paid probably $600 in the past 6 years to see in concert 6 times - released their newest album in 4 chunks. l was excited for the first one, interested in the second, didn't really care when the third came around, and didn't even know when the 4th was released until they had one consolidated album to promote. They were releasing as they went along, and halfway through I just decided to wait until the entire thing was done.

Maybe getting a day job kills their creative spirit. Maybe they already have jobs, unconventional jobs - maybe performing music IS their job (wedding bands, stock music/advertising, house band for a bar, studio musician). Trying to hustle your music to the point that they can "make money off of touring and merchandise" can also be a full time job. Touring is a full-time job that requires 100% dedication and would cost you most jobs.

"Music" is a hobby. Real musicianship, real songwriting, real skill, is an art. Money only kills quality in music when that's the only goal of music - we all hate record execs, promoters, Clear Channel music directors, MTV when it still played music videos, and other grifts, payola schemes, and crass commercialists - why shouldn't we hate Spotify execs for trying to inject their profit motive back into our musical tastes?

Good songwriting, good musicianship - that shit is TRANSCENDENT and people have and will pay good money for those experiences. Turning musicians into another content mill - maybe it works for some musicians, but it sure won't for others. Songs take time, iteration, and collaboration to develop, albums take a LONG time to record/mix/master, planning a tour takes longer than the actual tour lasts. Masterworks, or even just a catchy song, can take hundreds of hours to get to the recording that you hear.

You know why sophomore slumps have traditionally existed? Because a first album takes years to make - a second album is often rushed in a matter of months after the well has run dry. For every song on an album, there are either two dozen more that never made it out of the rehearsal room, or each song had weeks of effort dedicated to it.

Time is as much a resource for musicians as anything else - and taking that away from them will ruin a lot of them.

Exactly. And the death rate doesn't just start climbing at 70.

50-59 is 1.3% - that's still a huge number of people, a lot of long-established, highly-skilled senior-level workers and executives. We're not just talking about killing off Walmart greeters. There's a lot of institutional knowledge at this level of worker, and a lot of productivity. In industries that rely on "connections" and networks, these are your TOP guys, you lose them and you lose 20 years of memory - you don't even know what you won't know when you lose them.

60-69 - more than half of which is still working age for most Americans - is 3.6% death rate. How many CEOs or business owners fit that category? Everything that applies to the 50s applies here as well.

And if we send all these people back to work and the numbers jump up again, those percentages double or triple. We'd be killing off a lot of our most valuable, experienced, knowledgeable, and productive workers. How long can we keep all our managers, senior staff, owners, and best public-facing salesmen at home? With community spread, they'll still get sick anyway even if they're rich and isolated, and there's no "good health care" even for the well-off if hospitals get jammed during a pandemic.

Like COVID-19? Drop the 19, I assure you people will know what you're talking about. Covid's just as easy to type as wuflu, is the ACTUAL NAME of the virus, and isn't used as a dogwhistle to further a political agenda.

What has $600-700 billion a year in military spending got the U.S. in the past two decades? None of the major threats have been military in nature. Terrorism a la 9/11 is a law enforcement, intelligence, and security problem - trying to solve it militarily just wasted trillions, created ISIS, and eventually led the Taliban back to power - because of 3000 deaths. The 2008 financial crisis, the last great threat to the country that caused widespread death and destruction, was because of bad regulation and greed, also spurned on by the same people that caused the fiascos after 9/11.

This problem is medicinal and sociological and even political in nature - the military's done nothing to help, and anything the military does (surplus supplies that we paid military contractor rates for, fucking hospital ships?!) would have been cheaper if we just did it through a well-funded NIH, CDC, and national healthcare system. The military budget is 100x the CDC budget - how much better could we have handled this situation if you gave 1/20th of $800 billion to public health?

Of course, you'd have to actually LISTEN to them in the first place, which, of course, the same party in power for 9/11 that didn't listen to intelligence reports warning of Al-Qaeda and then chose to embark on two wars of choice - one of which was unprovoked - and encouraged reckless deregulation that led to the financial crisis is in power now, so, maybe there's something else we need to look at too.

People are also much less willing to accept mass death these days than they were before. Mortality rates have plummeted, life expectancy has shot through the roof, and medical advances have gotten everyone used to being healthy and living an (expensive) extra 10-15 years. We used to lose hundreds of thousands to wars, automobile accident death rates were an order of magnitude higher, companies used to routinely poison people with faulty products and not face consequences. In today's litigation environment, you can't even kill a baby without losing millions.

Everyone talking tough about getting back to work now will be horrified once there's a million dead people. No politician encouraging going back to work,only to spawn a wave of hundreds of thousands of deaths, will ever hold office again. Trump's already set a lower bound at 100,000 - by his own words, that's "a good job" - and a higher limit at 200,000. Anything reasonably higher than that is going to be held against him and the Republican party - and anything that's more than 3x that will guarantee electoral loss.

It's not about stopping the flow of cash completely, it's about giving everyone a break from their largest payment each month. If rent isn't paid, that gives other services a chance to get paid. Housing and commercial space is, by and large, paid off on some level - e.g. it doesn't *cost* anything for your 40 year-old house or 30 year-old strip mall to exist outside of basic upkeep and property taxes, as opposed to electricity, water, internet, and food. Rent is 95% wealth transfer to a landlord, mortgages are wealth transfers to banks. If we literally just said everyone who has a shelter-in-place is allowed to shelter rent-free for the time being, what does that cost? Obviously people are going to be losing money, but fuck, everyone's losing money, why should housing be the only investment vehicle immune to a crashing economy? If we just tack on a few months to the end of mortgages and leases and forego collecting rent for now, how much damage does that do - versus evicting literally millions of people and businesses who can't pay anyway? If you evict someone, who the hell else is going to move in right now? Will we be able to run a functioning society when everyone takes a 300 point hit to their credit score from bankruptcy and has evictions on record? You can't pretend like this is the same world as a month ago anymore - a lot of debt is going to either be forgiven or never paid after this as people are forced to walk away.

Now, I still haven't seen an answer to my question - what am I not seeing? How is giving everyone a nationwide pause on rent a worse alternative than evicting millions of people and businesses in 3 months when the eviction moratorium is lifted and 4 months rent is due? (As if 3 months will be the end of the crisis!)

I'm aware of the basics of inflation. They haven't shut down rent though. Specifically - if we stopped debt payments for mortgage and suspended rent, all the way up the chain from my apartment to corporate rent, such that nobody has any income from rent but nobody has to pay rent, but continued propping up banks with Fed money - what happens? It certainly will shut down some large housing lenders (although aren't the majority of mortgages backed by the government already?) but it would prevent a lot of economic havoc and fear amongst the millions of jobless - and really, by pumping money into unemployment insurance, we're already making payments to rental and housing companies, but what good is that doing?

Forgive rent/mortgages, let people have enough money, provide the loans to companies directly - enough to keep the doors open but they have to go to 0% profit for now. Investors take a hit but it helps hundreds of millions of people. What am I missing? I don't know what I don't know about why this would bring down the economic system.

How many employees are solely funded by rentals vs everyone in the country not having to worry about rent? We have unemployment insurance for those employees. Don't like anyone losing jobs but there's already gonna be 5 million unemployed, they would be a drop in the bucket. At least they wouldn't have to pay rent.