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Comment by sharker8 | Hacker News Reader

Actually making accounting fun for kids is also a good idea and should be encouraged.

Well you could say that about any vocation.

Maybe. But accounting, or at least grasping personal finance, is a practical gift in a way that many others aren't at an introductory level. For example if you only want to be a manager at McDonald's you have to learn the most basic of accounting tasks.

“Accounting” and “personal finance” and “spreadsheets” are three very different things that seem to have been used as if they were interchangeable in the subthread beginning with dave_sid’s hypothetical about an accountant asking about making spreadsheets more fun for kids.

They're very related, though. Kind of like "cooking", "personal nutrition" and "kitchen utensils".

Honestly, a small amount of programming knowledge would make a lot of jobs better

Agree: I followed my Dad around the farm for hours when I was a kid.

And yesterday I completed the first part of my prototype "gaming couch" and made sure those of my kids who cared could see how I did it.

Sure. The basics of a lot of vocations is something that is very useful to be able to do for yourself. A bit of plumbing, a bit of carpentry, a bit of cooking, a bit of cleaning, a bit of accounting, a bit of public speaking, etc. Pretty much the 101 of being an adult.

Or put another way, a skill or service being a vocation just means it's useful enough for enough people, so that society can support it functioning as a distinct job (or set of jobs). The more useful it is, the more demand there is for that job - but that also means the more useful it is to know the basics yourself. A random Joe or Jane doesn't really need to know how to x-ray stuff to find material defects, but they sure as hell will benefit from knowing how to wash their own clothes, fix their own faucets, balance their own books, ... and how to automate this and that in their use of computers.

Seeing as accounting is on its way to being mostly automated in the coming decades, this is not good advice.

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