> this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures
This is a major thing in many East Asian cultures as well, China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea. Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm, so that kids aren't studying past midnight, but some academies still stay open secretly as the parents are demanding the extra hours. It's a vicious circle: kids compete for the few spots in top universities so they can get into the best companies, average qualifications rise, so next generation have to compete even harder for the same few spots.
This is carried over to the US as well. Asians compete for the few spots in top universities, as they are held to higher standards already, and this just keep ratcheting up the average standard for Asians each generation.
I remember reading an article which talks about the difference between games and these interactive demos: games have objectives and goals, and for the demos without such, they're better to be called as "toys".
Likely a matter of the parents in richer neighborhoods being able to donate more time and money to the local school than in poorer neighborhoods. The buildings are better, there are more resources available to teachers, more extra-curricular activities, skilled teachers fight to be posted there. Certainly things can be improved at schools in poorer neighborhoods, but I doubt it could be equalized to the point where kids won't benefit from being bussed to the richer neighborhood schools.
Every chance I get I try to promote the Cahill-Keys projection. Not only does it better preserve area and reminds you that the earth is a sphere, it is also one of the more esthetically pleasing projections out there.
The billions of people in poorer countries are able to have access to the world's knowledge due to smart phones are better served by those cheap smartphone than something they can never afford.
Don't forget Just Dance. Just Dance 2 was the best selling 3rd party title for the Wii. Just Dance 3 was the 2nd best selling title of 2011, behind Call of Duty. As of 2013, Just Dance is Ubisoft's 2nd biggest franchise, behind Assassin's Creed. Teenage girls nowadays are still playing Just Dance all night at sleep overs.
Maybe your eyes are better than mine, but I have a real hard time working on a 13" screen. Trying to do Excel work on a tiny screen drives me up the wall. Either I'm sitting too close squinting at tiny text, or have to enlarge everything and fall into scrolling hell. With my 27" monitor I can enlarge the text and still have lots of screen real estate to do my work.
In a previous job, the owner of the company would do all the fun parts of the engineering -- the brainstorming, the rough specs, the prototypes -- and leave the details and grunt work to everyone else. He was having a ball.
> Yes, 100%, Boomers are the parent generation of Millennials. They spent our whole childhoods giving us participation trophies, and our whole young adulthood criticizing us for having received them.
I don't mean as a cohort, I mean as individuals. I have my doubts that the exact same person who has given out participation trophies is the one who criticized. I think you are mixing two separate groups into one, by using their birth years as a commonality.
Also, I suspect that participation trophies is a Western creation, perhaps even an American phenomenon, and the Boomers who are not part of those cultures did not participate in those actitivities.
Capacitors can die, for example. Anything with a battery backup, the battery can leak and damage components. Electronics are more prone to ESD and water damage than mechanical parts.
Going into the realm of unlikely scenarios, electronics are more susceptible to EMPs.
Baby Boomer generation is 1946-1964, which would make them 59-77. I expect only the younger range is likely to still be middle managers.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the use of "boomer" as a derogative to be reductionist and ageist, not to mention most of the time incorrect, as I've seen it applied all the way to Millennials.
The positive tradeoff to the system is that the employee who prefers to WFH is happier and less stressed, which leads to increased productivity and retention. Now whether this offsets the decreased productivity from not being there in person, that's what's being argued over.
Absolutely.
I personally found myself less likely to ping someone over Teams to ask them a small question versus leaning over to the next seat to ask. I was assigned a work-buddy when I was on-boarded, but I think I asked him a total of 3 questions. I believe that if I was on-boarded in-person, and had a few lunches with him, it would have been quite different.
Also, the fact that the only time I talk to my co-workers is over Zoom makes it necessary from a human relations point of view to start many meetings with a bit of chit-chat, which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.
This is similar to saying that you are just justifying your preference for board shorts and flip flops.
Although I am a huge proponent of WFH, I had found it very hard to build relationships during the beginning years of the pandemic, and it wasn't until travel has opened up and I met in-person many of the people who I've only ever met over Zoom that I was able to start building relationships, which noticeably accelerated a lot of the work that I do that relied on other people. It's just so much easier to break the ice with someone when meeting face to face. Also, people will tell you things when meeting 1-on-1 in person over a beer that they will never tell you in Zoom, and this applies to customers and vendors as well as co-workers, and is extremely useful to understanding the hidden forces which is sometimes crucial in doing your job well.
Could you pass on the results of your research? I don't think I found a dashcam at that price range, and I was actually looking to use an old smartphone as my dashcam, but it didn't seem like a good solution as 1. I would have to start the app manually whenever the phone powers up, and 2. I wouldn't want to leave the phone in a holder in the car all the time as it could invite thieves.
This reminds me of the 1st electronics company I worked at. We didn't have any ESD equipment, so I built a circuit which took power from a wall socket and pumped the voltage up to 2kV using diodes and caps, and sent that through a simple human body mode resistor/cap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-body_model) to do ESD testing. It worked well enough for the simple testing that we did, and was successful at finding weaknesses of our PCB layout for static protection.
I am responding to your comment that oral communication is impossible because of homonyms. I am not covering the difference between oral and written communication.
Too bad non pictographic languages weren't paired with simple orthogonal grammars and consistent spelling rules. Learning different languages always feel like choosing whether I want to beat myself up with my left fist, my right fist, or my feet.
I don't think that's right. One example would be the words with the same spelling which are pronounced differently depending on meaning (e.g. dragonfly and sleeping spot), you have to know what you are saying to pronounce it correctly.
Languages have different dimensions, including spelling, pronunciation, conjugation, grammar. English is moderately easy in spelling and pronunciation, but with exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions, it is harder than say Korean. Mandarin has more difficult spelling and pronunciation than English, but the low number of conjugations and tenses makes it much easier grammatically than English.
I believe if the incremental cost is small, the mental load would mostly fade into the background, just as I am aware that there is a cost every time I turn on the lights or the faucet, but it doesn't have a large impact on my usage except that I remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room and don't leave the faucet running when I soap up the dishes.
I've been in tech for decades, and I don't know how computers work. I can describe it from transistor level up to moderately complex logic circuits (basic memory cells, multipliers) but have a blank spot from there to Harvard architecture, then from IC level I know how circuit boards work, from layout to parasitics to bypass caps, but have a blank spot from there to advanced communications protocols (PCI bus etc). On the software side, I understand compilers, apps, and website operations, but am missing the whole chunk of how OSes and file systems work. Does any one person actual know how computers work?
And what does that mean for the largest group in the bell curve: the medium skilled programmer, who does ok but nonmagical work? Not everyone has the ability to be one or two standard deviations above the median.