Besides I think they’d be more well rounded working a well paying trade for example than going tens to hundreds of thousands in debt hanging out in echo chambers and coming out with no marketable skills.
At least that's what current society shows us. If the humanities graduates were actually a mass of well-rounded people that contributed to society, and happened to also have debt as a result, we'd be having a better conversation right now.
The current reality is that that many (not all) humanities majors are societal annoyances with little to show for their education and also have a ton of det.
Cursive is optimized for fountain pens I believe. As long as we have pencils and ballpoint pens, using cursive is just a holdover from olden times with no actual pros compared to simpler writing methods
I use fountain pens in my daily life and don't touch cursive (although my handwriting has some elements of it). It's a misconception that cursive was made for fountain pens.
Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the formal version taught in schools was essentially a prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented to help you write faster.
In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics became cheap.
Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off.
I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore.
For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
The few people alive today who actively still use cursive to write are just as equally capable of handwriting in a block or printed format, it's not a language or even a dialect.
And nothing of import today is written in cursive. (Not books, or literature, or legal texts, or contracts, nothing)
I do wonder is cursive really that hard to read without any lessons? It’s still English just with a awkward font. Writing cursive has a lot of rules but I would think most GenZers could read the constitution albeit slowly
A lot depends on penmanship. My grandmother was taught old school, and her cursive was so precise it looked like a font. Like she didn't use a ruler but everything she wrote till the day she died looked like she did.
Myself I've lost the ability to write cursive. Obviously I could get it back with a little practice but I see zero point in doing so. I barely even write anything vs type these days.
As a lefty, I was never going to have good penmanship without the ability to do it blind (your hand covers up what you are writing). I am so glad that penmanship became pointless to my career after sitting my university exams, and I had already learned that printing was the way to got anyways.
I'm a lefty, not sure what you mean by your hand covers up what you're writing?
I hold my pen so that it's pointing to the right, so that my hand trails the path of the pen tip. Do you...hold the pen so that it is pointing to the left so as to avoid smearing? Thus the pen tip is trailing the path of your hand?
If so, that's an ingenious solution to an annoying problem, don't know why I never thought of it before, but yeah that would make it impossible to write meticulously.
It could just be the way I was taught how to write but I never had problems with smearing, just occlusion. I just got used to not seeing what I was writing, and since I went into computers anyways, it was never something that needed correcting.
> I barely even write anything vs type these days.
Me as well, to the point that when I do write, it's a lot slower and less legible than it used to be. Most of that muscle memory has left in the last 30 years since I've been heavily using keyboards and writing less and less each year.
I can read this, but mostly I'm doing it through context and word recognition, not letter recognition. It's a struggle. This means there are some words that take a while to get.
Yes, that's the point. People can get the meaning even if the legibility is degraded, but this can only go so far. People scan the sentence, and if that doesn't work they scan groups of words, and if that doesn't work they read each word, and when that doesn't work they're stuck at sounding out each letter individually.
If someone's not familiar with 1800s cursive they're going to struggle and they're going to resort to trying to decipher individual letters - they will end up sounding out not only every individual word, but every individual letter.
That might still be an indication of your and my familiarity with English cursive.
With something that I only know well enough to sound out even when printed (e.g., Cyrillic), I have a hard time making head or tail of it in cursive form.
Also go work somewhere close to your standards. From experience I can tell you that this is a battle you can’t win in a reasonable time table. There’s a reason it is the way it is and you can’t change those people.
I mined for a few weeks out of curiosity and I figured it would work as a heater downstairs since it was winter. I would think that the best move was to sell your GPU about a month before it all ends since the actual mining doesn’t make enough money to offset the resale value plummet.
I know this is a drive-by joke, but in fact speculative bubbles (crypto among them) were among the big drivers of last year's inflation hump. Production was still suppressed by the pandemic, lots of expenditures (travel, etc...) were likewise suppressed, yet bank account balances were still around and wanting to be spent.
Broadly: what do you do when you can't go to Cancun like you planned? You bet on Doge and GME, apparently. (Or you declare yourself a "VC" and start handing out checks to 20-something quarantined hackers.) Then you just end up with more money you can't spend.
I had that a few years ago on those scummy up sell warranty plans they trick you into buying at car dealerships. I had to fax a signed cancellation form. Thankfully there are Web services that allow you to send pdfs but it was obnoxious.
