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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

While you make a good case for radio, there have to be cut-off points, at which techniques must be considered obsolete, not to burden educational systems and students unnecessarily in perpetuity.

While having the skill is a 1 or a 0 (either you know how to use a radio with some proficiency or you do not) the use cases for older/simpler technology get fewer and fewer gradually.

At which point can a system no longer afford to support technique x? Of course, it depends on the system but you are probably not going to wait before the probability hits 0 if you care even slightly about being efficient – but it's never an easy call to make.

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Let me offer a different perspective. Is rf engineering and research obselete? Should the ability to experiment be locked into spectrum owned by monopolistic companies? And from another angle, is an Arduino project that blinks an LED worthwhile? Spectrum is a limited resource and amateur bands are one of the last ways I know of for folks to experiment within radio without submitting for expensive fcc certification.

This!!

My (admittedly limited) understanding of baseband demodulation started with the swling I did as a teenager.

As we lose obsolete skills, we simultaneously become more interdependent on other humans, as the web of dependencies becomes more complex. More people need to coordinate action to complete even basic tasks.

With that in mind, preserving communications would seem to be near the top of the list (perhaps just below clean water?) when things go wrong. Radio seems like a good backup -- perhaps even ideal.

So I don't think we should compare radio to just any obsolete tech out there.

Of course that's true - we probably don't need to start re-teaching the abacus... but I'm careful about getting too complacent. When everything has been going well for a long time it's tempting to think this will continue forever. But one, say, global pandemic can bring everything down - and some of our modern conveniences can be gone... possibly for centuries.

An interesting (programming) talk by Jonathan Blow on the subject of losing knowledge! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

> we probably don't need to start re-teaching the abacus...

I get where you're going but concerning the abacus, I respectfully disagree.

I'm guessing you haven't seen the way some young Asian kids start using a Japanese abacus (Soroban), and after a few years have built a mental model of it enabling them to perform mental calculations -- faster than with a calculator.

Most of the good videos on YouTube seem to have disappeared, but some short snippets remain.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus

I was recently in a line at the store where a person paid using cash, a rare thing these days. The Cashier, mid 20's person, could not even tabulate the total amount handed to them in their mind to enter that total in the computer to get the change amount. Ended up handing it back to the customer using "how much is there"

I wept for the state of public education, basic addition is lost skill it seems

> I wept for the state of public education, basic addition is lost skill it seems

What does this have to do with "public education"?

They could have been taught it in elementary school, but if they were in their mid-20s, then it would probably have been over a decade since they were tested on it even in secondary/high school.

And that skill would have atrophied with non-use on a day-to-day basis.

basic addition is not a skill that atrophies. We are talking the most basic math there is, adding whole numbers. 1+1 = 2, or in this case 50+20+1+1+1+5 = 78

> basic addition is not a skill that atrophies.

The evidence you provided suggests otherwise. :)

I'm sure the person can still add, but it's a bit slow(er) without practice, they got frustrated, and so handed back the change.

But when do people need to do more than a handful of mental calculations? While you might be faster with a mental abacus than with a calculator, I doubt that you beat an Excel spreadsheet. If Excel is unavailable for some reason either the source data you would need is unavailable too, or your mental calculation speed is not fast enough to be useful, even with the mental abacus.

Well, yes, a big enough global pandemic can derail a lot of our current systems. That is exactly where it gets problematic to me: To what extent is what kind of crisis a reasonable scenario that has to be taken into consideration? Is it reasonable to widely prepare people for a civilization ending pandemic? A meteor impact? And to what extent?

The potential costs are limitless (both in money and in lifetime because you can never be too prepared), the potential benefit is absolute, the risk (when assessing by statistical impact on total human lifes so far) very low. How do you possibly weigh such things?

All-digital communication systems are notorious for failing in natural or otherwise disasters; that's the reason why radios, whether used by official agencies or hams or both, are very relevant in those circumstances. Hence this isn't really a discussion in my opinion.

You are absolutely correct, but we are not near that point with amateur radio. If you haven't seen what's going on with amateur radio in a while, you might be pleasantly surprised. The hobby has not stagnated or gone away due to the advent of cell phones.

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