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jll29

A range of abilities seem to be in decline:

- inability to hand-write

- inability to solve an equation system or to calculate the zero points of a polynomial

- inability to read a book cover to cover and to summarize its contents

- inability to listen to a 2 hour lecture concentrated and to take notes

- inability to conduct a scholarly literature search on a topic (other than coming back with 8 blue Web links)

- inability to find the library or to use it other than for drinking coffee with friends

- inability to read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazine to stay informed about current events

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Don’t forget:

- inability to milk a cow

- inability to chisel messages on a stone tablet

- inability to navigate the seas using only the stars

- inability to light a lantern without spilling the oil

- inability to decipher a message sent via smoke signals

- inability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning sundial

- inability to sharpen a quill

Some skills similar to those would be great abilities to have still, and way more environmentally friendly and self-succifient than our current dependencies...

But the comparison of those with the parent's list, as if to imply the parent's items are equally useless or "deprecated", is indeed very troubling...

Smoke signals environmentally friendly? Fun.

Compared to the "smoke" emissions of the huge infrastructure for electrical powered signals (whether directly fossil fuel powered or "renewable" using panels and wind turbines still built, transported, and installed with hugely polluting resources and processes, themselves powered by fossil fuels)? You'd be surprised.

And that's just a first level comparison, a meta level would include the huge waste enabled by a real-time inter-connected world, over one with limited local signalling abilities.

If the material that is burned is wood, no net addition to the carbon cycle occurs. The issue with burning fossil fuels isn't the burning, it's the fossil fuels.

But knowing people, they'll find some way to make cheap, quickly manufactured smoke signal machines.

the GP's thing is a list of generic, nigh-ageless kids-these-days gripes so it's a decent target for light mockery.

the parent list rues lost sharpness of mind/mental industry in the general population. a few people still have it, and it makes them our overlord, inevitably.

compared thus, your list is nonsense: a careless slapdash composed in a quick, gotcha-y response to a well-deserved criticism.

And before the gramophone was invented, getting the latest tune for home entertainment often meant bringing the sheet music home and sight reading it at the family piano. I don't have a wider point to make about modern skill levels, but I do admire such things being fairly common.

while some are negative effects of other activities (smartphones etc.), some are just in decline because their usage is in decline, which is ok.

I haven't used the library to check out a book in years and I rarely write something by hand except to take notes. And despite me having taken post-graduate level pure math-lectures, I will struggle to solve an equation system that involves concrete numbers instead of variables that also don't cancel, i am just astonishingly bad at mental arithmetic.

I disagree for some, like "inability to conduct a scholarly literature search on a topic (other than coming back with 8 blue Web links)" and "inability to read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazine to stay informed about current events". Some don't care and some do, so they either research or try to be as lazy as possible. I can imagine it's always been this way.

>- inability to solve an equation system or to calculate the zero points of a polynomial

Often overlooked skills in the modern world...

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