rexgallorum2

This one requires a little lateral thinking. Why not get rid of report cards, or grades, altogether? The use of online platforms where teachers are expected to enter grades in real time sounds like a massive burden on the teachers, not to mention a privacy/security risk. Terrible.

What if they don't have smartphones?

I don't buy the regulation argument. Regulators will not have a sufficient understanding of the systems they are regulating, and of course regulation is too slow to react to a dynamic phenomenon. Perhaps more basic regulation stipulating liability if something goes wrong would be of use.

I suggest we apply some lateral thinking to the underlying problem and approach it from another perspective entirely. Over the last 30 years or so, really since the end of the Cold War, high on idealism and technological utopianism, we've built a whole new high tech infrastructure to replace the low-tech infrastructure that preceded it. In so doing, we have invariably embraced technologies that we did not and do not understand, technologies that have never really been tested (as in been subjected to the test of time). Was this wise? Should we be using new, unproven technologies for security critical systems? These new systems have untold vulnerabilities, and their often centralised structure makes them very susceptible to disruptions. Should we not be building robust, decentralised, low tech solutions instead? Could something as fundamentally vulnerable as modern undersea cables have survived a cataclysm like the Second World War? I anticipate that any valuable data sitting on a networked device anywhere is at risk of eventually being lost, leaked, or stolen. Any networked safety critical system will be hacked or otherwise exploited (or fail catastrophically). It is only a matter of time. So much of modern (hybrid) warfare hinges on sowing discord, confusion, using disinformation and misinformation to cripple adversaries--and we have collectively built an infrastructure that is tailor made for this kind of disruption. What I mean is virtually everything that has come into being in the last 30 or so years, from complex global supply chains to modern banking. What that exists now would survive a SHTF scenario (not hard to imagine)? Again, we should be designing systems to be robust, decentralised, secure, and wherever possible, totally independent of high tech gadgetry. What use would 'identity theft' have been in the 1970s? Exactly.

(Sorry for long quote, but this is good...)

"The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.

Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.

By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jun/11/why-our-foo...

The loss of culinary traditions I mentioned also includes the age-old habit of creatively re-using leftovers to make new things. Cook potatoes one day, grate the leftovers and make potato pancakes the next. In so many ways the vast generational shifts in food culture in countries like the US over the last century or so are a direct reflection of a dozen or more other social, cultural, and economic processes that have taken place in tandem.

The loss of food culture in the US is partly to blame. All of the loopy fad diets people are describing here are a symptom of the same larger problem that has caused the obesity epidemic. There is no shortage of intact culinary cultures in the world that include wonderful, healthy, inexpensive things that anybody can prepare with a little time and love. Accordingly, your best bet for good, cheap produce and healthy stuff in a big city is any immigrant/ethnic market. These usually depend on parallel supply chains that allow them to undercut and outperform mainstream supermarkets.

This is down partly to cultural and lifestyle differences. This sort of communal food culture is still alive and rather widespread in continental Europe but largely dead in the US.

That will definitely work, but there must be some other factor at play. There are plenty of populations in the world that consume a lot of grain but do not necessarily suffer from increased rates of obesity.

The more you can integrate moderate physical activity into your daily routine as a matter of getting things done rather than as a specific chore you have to do, the better. Cutting sugar consumption should also help. I'd start there and see what happens.

What a terrible menu. It has 'cultural poverty' written all over it. Food is a major manifestation of culture--food speaks volumes about the people who prepare and eat it.

A: You hire an external contractor to do work (roofing, pouring concrete, creating a website, etc.), the contractor should have full autonomy (and liability) regarding how, when, and by whom the work is done--the contractor is responsible for the end result. A good (bad) example might be a language school--just the type of business that often operates in this grey area. A language school might 'hire' a teacher, technically an independent contractor, to do teaching work, yet nonetheless treat the teacher as an employee, specifying exact teaching times, methods, books, locations, etc., closely monitoring performance (as with an employee), and even integrating the person into an internal hierarchy (so the boss becomes a boss rather than a client). True autonomy (freedom from control) in this case would be the freedom to decide upon the times, locations, methods, materials, etc. and a dependence upon own's own independent expertise while performing the contracted duty.

C: The contractor (ideally) works for many companies (i.e. has many clients) and not just for you. Is the contractor (individual or company) independently established? When determining C, the authorities might look specifically at things like whether the contractor has an established business location, whether the contractor has employees, how much work the contractor does for any individual client, etc.

On GDPR: Could Facebook users around the world not set their location to somewhere in the EU and/or use a VPN to connect through servers in the EU?

Double check the thresholds in the various EU member states. They differ considerably, and the UK is an outlier in that it is so high.

I live in a middle-sized city in Germany that is also struggling with a housing shortage and rising rents (though not anything like San Francisco). This particular city is somewhat unique in that it is rather sprawling (for Germany) with a lot of low-rise buildings and single family homes. The first solution to the problem was to build houses behind houses behind houses and to build on (formerly generous) back gardens. Now, with land values so high, much of the older housing stock (old enough to be inefficient but too young to be protected by historic preservation laws) is being torn down and replaced by small, low-rise blocks of flats. This has its own problems (small unit sizes are family unfriendly, for example), but it is slowly easing the supply of housing without significant geographical expansion of the city. I bring this up because this strategy is exactly what is being discussed in a number of US cities. New construction in Germany is highly regulated, but the rules themselves do not produce the sort of socially and economically homogeneous residential enclaves you often see in the US, nor do they result in a strict separation of residential and commercial districts (shops of all kinds are often mixed into residential areas or have flats on top). In short, there are no ghettos, most residential areas are very mixed in terms of income and property types, and businesses and basic services are always readily accessible on foot or with a bike (you don't see those typically American situations where, due to terrible urban planning and strict zoning, one has to drive 3 miles to travel 150 yards from a home to a supermarket or some other destination). I think there must be some middle path whereby local stakeholders and municipal officials can regulate urban land use without arbitrarily dividing a city into self-contained, homogeneous zones.

@TomMarius et al.: True. 'Continental Europe' is just meant to exclude the UK and Ireland for obvious reasons.

But what constitutes 'speaking English'? https://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf

I think we are currently watching a number of cultural currents and counter-currents (re)emerging, and the increasing interest in new urbanism and walkable, mid-density, mixed-use neighborhoods is one of them. You could tie it to a broader rejection of modernism and capitalist realism and a dozen other -isms that have defined the look and feel and very substance of life in the US since 1945, and an increasing tendency to look to the past for traces of alternative presents/futures that never came into being (see Mark Fisher). Hipster retro fetishism is only the tip of the iceberg.

This was definitely aimed at specialists and advocates of new urbanism. The writer is correct to a degree--post war urban planning (sprawl building) in the US has been a disaster and the paradigm is on the verge of changing (and it will be a generational shift). In some areas it has already changed--this is one issue the author talks about when referring to 'retreat' to urban districts that predate sprawl. I think that bit was referring to the recent tendency for 'walkable' pre-war urban districts to experience rapid gentrification, while post-war sprawl areas (in some cases inner ring suburbs) lag behind and decay. This model doesn't apply everywhere, but it is emerging in some places nonetheless. Right now you can easily find examples of new sprawl construction and rapidly rising property values in pockets of pre-modernist neighborhoods in a single city.

I will second this. I've lived and taught (and tested) English in continental Europe for a decade. The idea that most people in continental Europe speak English is a misconception, and one should take population-level statistics on language proficiency with a grain of salt.

Education is a sacred cow for cultural reasons and probably a gigantic waste of resources on the whole.

I think it would help to step back (rather like an anthropologist) and ask fundamental questions regarding the social, cultural, and economic functions of education in a given society or economy (or globally) and go from there.

Regarding practical, real world questions on the value of a college education, I can only say this: as much as I dislike German-style educational tracking, the so-called 'dual system' in Germany does produce interesting results, and provided the right conditions, something like it could be put into practice elsewhere. At the very least it provides workers with the necessary technical skills to do their jobs while shielding them somewhat from competition from outsiders (this protectionist function should in theory help buoy up wages and add job security, though collective agreements and general employment law contribute to both) without without sending them to college. One can and should of course debate the merits of general education and its putative political, social, and cultural benefits, but if we are talking about the bare-bones technical skills and practical experience needed to do a job, a parallel apprenticeship and vocational training system as exists in Germany is a viable alternative to university.

I could say a lot more, but I will leave it at that for now.

In the case of the US, it's really an infrastructure issue. Attitudes follow from that.

I grew up in the US and live in Europe now, and I bike or walk everywhere. The difference is of course staggering.

Here, biking is just something ordinary people do to get around, and it doesn't require any special equipment or make any kind of statement. In the US, biking is primarily associated with recreation and a specific subculture.

In the US case, changing infrastructure priorities and urban planning practices will go a long way toward alleviating the problem.