Absolutely, and of all the rote learning they stopped teaching (multiplication tables, keyboarding) I think cursive isn't a big deal. But I did have a co-op student a few years ago, and we were talking about something and I wanted to sketch it, so I went to grab a piece of paper and he goes, "wait, I'll pull up a notepad app on my phone" so I wait, and wait, and he's tapping and swiping and then the app doesn't work, and he has this stylus and it's not working, and I go, "look, let's just do this on paper" and I pull a piece of printer paper out of the printer and start sketching the idea. There are just too many times when you need to get an idea down on whatever surface you have around you, and you don't want to be dependent on having a tablet or a phone or whatever handy. And to do that you need practice making marks on paper with a pen or pencil. I assure you that my kids' printing ability is barely legible (even the 16 year old girl who gets A+ marks) and they didn't take cursive. The idea that a 16 year old girl would have illegible handwriting in the 80's or 90's was unheard of, unless they were mentally challenged.

my son's teacher told us that it helped with developing fine motor control, particularly in children that had below average motor control.

For one, is this based on research or speculation? Second there are different kinds of motor control. Following an existing pattern or shape is one type, while cursive is another because one tends to develop patterns based on personal preferences.

Are the loops male, female, or something else? (ducks head in FL)

In 5th grade my teacher wanted to wring my neck because I was growing quite skillful in drawing and art, yet my cursive writing was worse than a drunk doctor's. I didn't see them as connected, but it was in the teacher's mind. I had a semi-impressionistic art style such that stroke precision mattered less.

CursiveGPT

By definition, conservatives prefer much of the past

You are just quoting pop-psychology. Go look at some actual research. My wife is a school psychologist. Kids' performance in fine motor skill tasks have fallen drastically, while video gaming has been going up. The lack of instruction in writing in schools is a significant contributor to this problem.

There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.

We sat in the evenings teaching them how to read (sounding words out), doing adding, subtracting, and multiplying flashcards with them, and I bought a typing tutor program and repeatedly encouraged them to use it. The Ontario government brought back mandatory cursive teaching to classrooms just after my kids left elementary school. I would say, of all these things, learning your times tables is way more important than cursive. There was a lot of research in recent years showing that both "learning to understand" *and* rote learning are important for a child's education, but it seems like the school boards won't admit their mistakes until the people who made those mistakes retire.

Just as my kids entered high school, the provincial government, worried that certain minority groups weren't doing well on tests and were over-represented in basic classes (vs. academic level) decided to de-stream both grade 9 and grade 10, and remove all exams from grades 9 and 10 as well. You don't have to write an exam in Ontario until you reach grade 11. Let's be clear... the data showed that kids from minority groups weren't doing as well, and their solution was to stop collecting data. It's absurd.

I really do feel like the education system was unethically experimenting on my kids this whole time. The worst part is that they were basing their decision on pop-psychology teacher-memes instead of hard and fast evidence-based research. The cost of these mistakes will be paid by the generation of kids who are only now moving on to university and the workforce. The whole saga sickens me.

You are correct. To be a bit more specific, the reason a fiat currency has value is because people owe debts in that currency and must repay their debts, legally, by a certain date. Therefore you know that there are many people out there who are incentivized to offer you products or services in exchange for your dollars before their mortgage payment is due this month.

Indeed, as long as a human bears the end responsibility there is no problem.

I'm glad Oracle is keeping the async pollution out of Java. Java is more of a business or admin domain language, and less for systems software. You don't really need that for biz/admin coding, and there are ways to still implement for the rare cases.

I guess I'm not working on "typical CRUD apps" then?

Based on your description, no, you are not, other than maybe "data stores". Sounds like systems programming. And it's rare to need such for app-level database access (unless you did something wrong or bad).

other than async and await keywords here and there.

It tends to force the need to parts that have nothing to do with asynchronous programming other than being referenced by parts that do. It pollutes and spreads like prions in a brain.

Elon likes his rocket toys, and thus needs money.

Doesn't Elon's pay depend on Tesla revenue? If for example BYD kicks Tesla's ass, Elon gets lackluster pay.

Java's Mono library is a poor substitute for C#'s async/await keywords

The Async/await stuff is just syntactical bloat for most typical CRUD apps. I suspect it's there to help MS save on cloud costs, rarely helps devs.