I forget where I read it, but this isn't a very thought-out view. _Especially_ with the example of access ramps -- yes, the ramps were originally put in after activism for better wheelchair accessibility. But who ended up using them a whole lot and benefiting from them? Parents with strollers. Would we say that the needs of parents of young children, or young children are a minority? Do we not care about their experience even when we're having a population crisis?
In hindsight, this is a pretty obvious conclusion if we would have taken a bit of extra time to consider why we might want accessibility ramps, but instead we get sidetracked by exactly the kind of thinking displayed by your comment.
When people say "accessibility is good for everyone" it's not a naive feel-good comment. It's an acknowledgement that at some point all of us could use help with accessibility (e.g. when you become a parent, when you get old, etc)
That's interesting. Most of the people I know would get (or have gotten!) bored of that after a few months, a.k.a. after the burnout has passed. On that list I include: me, my dad, his friends, multiple friends who quit their startup/bigcorp jobs etc. I myself quit on very little notice and spent a few months literally doing nothing but watching TV, and one day I just woke up and it had passed. The next few months I learned how to produce music, learned a new programming framework, treated parents way better, showed up for my friends, etc. Saw the same happen to my friends and my dad when he retired.
An interesting consideration here that I don't see mentioned in the comments is the difference between the destination and the _journey_.
The paper asks, "would you want to know during the wedding ceremony whether your marriage is going to end in divorce?" There are 4 reasons offered for not wanting to know ("to avoid the negative emotions, to maintain the positive emotions of surprise, to gain a strategic advantage, to implement fairness") but my reason would be this: there is a difference between knowing the outcome, and knowing _why_. And there is a difference between being able to express _why_, and truly feeling it and accepting it. And I don't think there is any way to get there other than through living it.
The human mind and our capacity to learn/grow is incredible, but we only learn and accept things when we are ready to. Sometimes you learn a little too late (e.g. after your divorce) what it means to be a present partner, but that doesn't mean you didn't learn it as _soon as you could_. And no knowing the future can change that. I mean, how many of us have been told over and over that we should be grateful for something (e.g. our parents, our partners, our jobs) but only truly learned the lesson once we lost it?
Sometimes I think we have too myopic a view of what "knowing" really means.
Same situation, but I've started! I only spend about 30 minutes every other day, and it's extremely slow-going, but so fulfilling. I had the same goal as you -- _really_ learning & understanding math.
I finished pre-Algebra last year and I'm halfway through an Algebra text by Gelfand & Shen now. My friends look at me funny when I tell them I'm re-learning Math from the ground up for fun (esp. with a degree in CS) but it has been so rewarding. I probably won't get to finishing Calculus for another couple years but I'm already having so much fun. Stumbled upon deriving some exponent laws last month by accident and truly understanding the sum and difference of squares has been awesome.
As a language enthusiast who speaks ~5 languages at varying levels, I can relate to the feeling of "I am fully capable to have conversations about almost anything, but I don’t feel fluent at all". What I'd ask is: what exactly do you mean by fluent? In my opinion and experience, fluency is contextual. It's very hard to apply it in a generalized manner.
I'll give an example. I studied German in college, got to C1, and am comfortable reading/discussing the news, my hobbies, going out, day-to-day affairs. I learned a lot of my vocabulary by reading newspapers, and was regularly discussing geopolitics. I had no problem making friends in Germany, and I did not feel anxious speaking German. However, I would have trouble watching TV kids shows or spending time with a child in German. I have no idea what a lot of animals are called, or vegetables I don't usually buy. I've never learned how to say "You have sleep eyes" (or the local equivalent) or "Your shoelaces are untied" because it was never relevant to me.
On the other hand, growing up in an English-speaking country in a Cantonese household, I can say all those things in Cantonese. I'm very accustomed to a domestic setting in Cantonese. But politics? News? As if.
Folks often equate "Fluency" with "Speaking/understanding the language like a native", and I think this is a very unhelpful false equivalence. Comfort in a language across all situations and aspects are simply a function of luck and time, and folks in their native languages have simply had more time and more chances to be lucky. You can absolutely be fluent without equalling a native speaker, and honestly if you can have a conversation about almost anything, you're fluent in my books.
If you're looking for actionable items though, I'd advise thinking about why you feel non-fluent and being more focused. Is it humour? Watch comedies. Is it domestic conversations that won't come up by watching the news? Kids books, children's shows, parenting podcasts. Is it politics and general affairs? Newspapers. "Just speak with natives" is good advice in general, but it's not going to address your pain points unless you make intentional efforts.
You will get these things over (a long period of) time, but these are ways you can be more specific.
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EDIT: I'll add one last thing. In some ways, fluency is confidence. Even native speakers will reach the age of 50 and not know the meaning of common words. The difference is, they'll have the confident response of just shrugging it off and learning it (or not!) because they feel ownership of the language. Meanwhile, a non-native learner might think it's their fault and something they HAVE to learn. I think this is why a lot of non-native speakers actually have much larger vocabularies than a lot of my Canadian friends :P
I feel confident with my English. I don't feel bad when I don't know how to say something and I can't talk in almost situation. However, in the IT field (and in almost all professional fields) you have to speak properly to be considered an "expert". I'm not talking about having a different accent, I'm talking more about things like using the proper verbs tenses or the best sentence structure. This is what I want to point out when I refer to fluency.
Ahh, grammar & such! In that case, I'd actually say what you probably want is more input, and not output. Your brain should intuitively know what the correct tense and sentence structure is, and the only way it can learn that is by consuming VAST amounts of content in that language.
Then with a little attention, you'll start using the correct tenses and sentence structures as matter of course :)
Like many others I don't love the idea of a "How to work with me" manual because -- like much of this one -- they can come off as a one-way directive. However, context matters.
If a random person on my team or the manager of some other team handed this to me? No, no, and no. Huge red flag. But if I was joining a team for the first time and my manager handed me a manual of expectations and made it clear what they value, what they expect, and how they see the world, that would be a treasure trove for my career. After all, managing my career is essentially managing my manager.
That being said, this document... isn't that. I appreciate the intent, but like many have said, it can be a little self-indulgent :)
Wish it were so simple. I (and my partner, an Urban Planning graduate!) had the exact same opinion as you until half a year ago my partner finally found a job out of school... in a small municipality. So we moved away from our very compact city of Toronto.
The reality is just different here. We're not going to bike everywhere on the highway in Ontario in the winter, when it's -20C with windchill. We can't even get the government to bring internet to every street, much less bike lanes, street lighting, better infrastructure. My partner is really trying to make change at city hall, but it's just... difficult.
And of course, we'd love to have kept living in Toronto, but it's completely unaffordable and this is where the job was. And thousands if not millions of other folks are living in similar realities. Perhaps we could convince everyone who lives in small towns to move to the city, but the city is already a difficult enough place to live.
We should do everything we can as individuals to make this better, but that "everything" is getting the local government to actually do something to make biking a real possibility. Until then, blanket statements like yours are just humblebrags about either your city, your situation, or your amazing willpower.
+1000. Almost everyone who's "singled" me out to be a mentor has been some greedy CS + Business grad who asks me mostly emotional or money-related questions that I essentially can't answer other than with "It depends on you and what you personally want."
This one guy specifically, who keeps reaching out to me, once kept me on a call for almost an hour basically asking me whether or not he should re-neg on an offer he signed ONE WEEK BEFORE THE JOB STARTED because he'd kept applying and got an offer somewhere else that paid more. I basically said "I mean if that's what you really want, you should do it, but be aware that the tech world is small and it's not going to look good" and he just kept trying to rationalize it because he'd clearly already made up his mind.
Another time, he sent me an email that started with "I just wanted to thank you for your help last time" but then immediately would delve into some other totally asinine quandary he'd gotten into because he had no integrity and/or trust in other people.
> "Nuclear waste in canisters has never hurt anyone"
This is an interesting statement, and though true I think it's a bit disingenuous.
I'm no expert on nuclear or nuclear power, but I recently listened to a Canadaland podcast about nuclear waste [0] and did a little extra reading [1][2] on deep geological nuclear disposal. If what I heard/read is to believed, it sounds like although the international science community has agreed on the best and safest way to bury nuclear waste, this hasn't _actually_ ever been done.
It's one thing to say to a community "in theory, we all agree that if everything is done correctly this is the best solution" and another COMPLETELY to trust that 1) The task will be done right, 2) The governing body (NGO, government, etc) will be around for the full lifetime of the nuclear waste being a threat (~150+ years), and 3) Said governing body will be well-funded enough the entire time to do the job right.
I believe that the engineering solutions are sound, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the concern "often good science isn't executed very well". Until this is addressed, I'm not sure "but the science says!" is going to be a very effective response. For something as high-stakes as this, we need a more comforting guarantee.
We might compare to what happened next to the Farallon islands, off California. At least 47,500 barrels of nuclear waste, weighted with concrete, just dropped in the water. (Those that floated anyway were shot.)
The fate of the barrels was an example in my differential equations course. (tl;dr: They burst when they hit the sea floor.) Wikipedia suggests that "by 1980, most of the radiation had decayed". Excepting what hadn't, of course.
All that observed, the problem with nuke plants is absolutely not the waste. The overwhelming problem is the outrageous cost, and that they don't start displacing fossil fuels for years, if ever. A dollar sunk into a nuke plant instead of renewables is simply sunk, as far as the climate is concerned.
Oddly, my solar projects have not had 5x, 3x, or even 1.5x cost overruns, never mind multi-year unplanned delays. And, they started producing immediately.
There are some examples I can think of where nuclear waste is being stored underground:
By people: underground nuclear bomb tests
Naturally: there are some spots where nuclear fission reactions have happened on their own, leaving the waste where the fissile uranium used to be
These aren't going to be the same contents as what power plant waste looks like, of course, but they certainly provide some evidence on how safe/not safe it is
In hindsight, this is a pretty obvious conclusion if we would have taken a bit of extra time to consider why we might want accessibility ramps, but instead we get sidetracked by exactly the kind of thinking displayed by your comment.
When people say "accessibility is good for everyone" it's not a naive feel-good comment. It's an acknowledgement that at some point all of us could use help with accessibility (e.g. when you become a parent, when you get old, etc)