> if I have a store with 500 products, will it pre-render the HTML (photos, etc.) for all 500 products and serve it as a static request?
You can set it up to retrieve all 500 products and render the html on the server.
> What if my store has multicurrency / multilingual versions of all these 500 pages - will it pre-render all of these combinations?
The server is making all the requests that would have been made on the frontend. So if the server knew the locale of the user it could presumably load the correct currency and language.
> There is a model that has shown to have a service people want and are willing to pay for, the market will find the right price with a different company
If the right price is more than outright owning a car I don't see how. Today I don't drive because I can uber. If ubers end up costing me more than $300 a month I'll just get a car.
Learning of (keyword of) concepts and ideas is fun but the reason schools exist is because most learning is a grind. Learning to draw well, learning a language, learning an instrument, and even learning math and logic require going through the grind of learning and repetition.
The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful (or useless).
Exploring is fun for children and adults. Being exposed to new things is always interesting. The grind is the hard part.
I think the question is how much of the grind is necessary. When our oldest kids were very little, we would work on the alphabet and numbers and track milestones carefully. At some point we realized that we could either grind hard at stuff they just didn't quite get, or we could wait a few months until they were older and just tell them stuff and they'd remember it. And obviously it wasn't quite that easy, but it felt kind of like magic at the time. When the kids were ready to learn, they just did, no grinding required.
Naturally, something like playing a musical instrument requires grinding (though it's not grinding if you like it!). But I think other than like, the times tables or the periodic table, there's almost nothing in school that inherently requires a grind. It just feels like a grind, because school is often unpleasant.
I think an average, literate adult could learn basically the entire American K-12 history curriculum in a few months of reading. Most of what passes for history in elementary school could be compressed into... what, a hundred pages, maybe? And high school is another thousand pages.
I think math is the same way. It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months.
I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults, which I think unschooling is really well-suited to.
Yeah! Bit of a tangent: in my experience even the times table isn't inherently a grind, though at a higher level maybe arithmetic might have to be. When I was in school faced with memorizing the times table conventionally, I decided "this is silly and boring, what I'm gonna do instead is keep the table visible while I do arithmetic problems, and it'll get memorized automatically along the way", and that worked fine.
It's the same principle as learning touch-typing with the keyboard layout visible on a card in your field of view (not the same as looking down at the keyboard, which I agree is a bad habit that slows you down).
'It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months. I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults'
It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right? If you're getting good at doing something you love because you love doing it so much, I don't think 'grind' is a word you'd use to describe that time consuming process.
I think 'grind' is caused by a disconnect between what the learner is being made to do and what they want to do. Grind can therefore be reduced by providing people with the opportunity to study things that interest them, for instance by offering a broader range of educational 'tracks', or by reformulating lesson plans to make the material more interesting (explaining the real world applications or consequences of the subject matter.)
>It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right?
That's the thing though, even with something you enjoy you will, or should hopefully, hit 'the grind'. That point where it gets hard and you force yourself to keep going even through.the parts you don't enjoy.
School forces you to do this, if you're teaching yourself something, you need to force yourself to do this.
I can't count the number of times i've heard someone say something like
'I tried learning/doing this new thing and it was fun for a bit but it ended up being way harder than I thought.'
And that's usually the point where they've given up or moved on.
But that's usually the point where learning breakthroughs happen and getting through the grind tends to cement those new facts or that new activity better.
That's usually the point where it starts being fun again too, until the next hump to grind through.
It's like an old nintendo game or something. One of those really hard ones that forces you to replay the same thing over and over again just to gain the tiniest bit of progress. Even though the game's probably fun, that's the point where people start throwing controllers and stuff. Yet when you get past those hard sections and make some progress. Suddenly, you feel good and have fun again.
Learning things is very much the same process. Even things you enjoy. The secret is to push yourself through the less fun parts.
Just quickly too, more of an aside, I feel like modern games lack this aspect and i think it's a big part of why many people complain about modern games. They don't stimulate and teach you through failure and repitition, there's usually no consequences, you have no breakthrough 'Aha I can do this now' moments, there's no learning or lessons to be had. Just mindless progression that never really feels like progress.
Good teacher can help to overcome barrier. Unfortunately there are not many good teachers. As other pointed out maybe one or two in public school.
I'm with you that practice is a king but blind struggle ruins passion. I've took salsa lessons for several years, drummed it wrong, have to unlearn bad practices. I've took guitar recently, overcome in a few months what could not in school (good enough instrument and youtube videos).
I've gotten good at a few things in life that required a "grind." The violin is the clearest example. Getting decent requires an hour or so a week -- you can generally fart around and play whatever's accessible to your skill level. Good requires an hour or two per day, of deliberate and focused practice. People don't play études for fun. Excellence requires several hours per day. Even Itzhak Perlman describes his practice regimen as tedious, and I once heard him say that he practices while watching TV, to alleviate the boredom. Paganini, on the other hand, played all day to forestall his father's physical abuse.
I was "good," for a time, but pursuit of excellence never met my cost benefit analysis
Surely the grind of learning to play a violin would be far worse if you disliked violins in the first place, right? If you force somebody who hates violins to practice playing one for hours a day, the grind would be intolerable and they'd probably hate their life. The people most likely to find the grind tolerable are the people who really want it.
> It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right?
I'd summarize my answer as "no, it's still a 'grind'." To answer your followup, "yes, it can be even worse if you hate the basic act."
On a meta level: life sucks and involves hardship. There's value in grinding on things you hate. If you've only succeeded at things that you love, your success is quite likely fragile. Resiliency is developed by accepting, and grinding, your way to success at something you hate.
This is true on its face for anyone who's spent hours and hours trying to beat a tough level of a video game -- we even call it "grinding" (at least in some contexts, namely RPGs), and to some extent it's not really "fun," but it also has a satisfying and compulsive aspect that drives you onward despite the challenge. I can't recall public education ever stirring the same sort of feeling in me (and I did quite well in school).
Pleasure vs. satisfaction. Grinding is not pleasurable (in fact quite frustrating at times), but the satisfaction of completing the challenge may be more sustainable as a source of happiness.
Types of fun:
Type 1: Fun while performing the activity
Type 2: Bad while performing the activity, fun in hindsight
Type 3: Bad while performing the activity, bad in hindsight
I would argue that Type 2 is desirable but doesn't fit in this framework.
I'm of the opinion that while it's a necessary part of learning to repeat exercises to advance your skillset, school is much too focused on this element of learning, and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done).
The problem is that this mishandling gives people a bad taste for associated activities, especially STEM subjects, and it's rare for people to subject themselves to what seems like an incredibly boring process when they're not being forced to. As such, most of the competency they may have been forced to gain is lost, along with potential passion.
Even repeating exercises can be fun when you understand the motivation behind it. For example, if you have a real passion for understanding Newtonian physics, the parts of calculus that might be 'rote' when unmotivated and part of a purely rote process can become some of the most enjoyable.
> and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done)
That's likely part of it. I see another reason: I believe schools' incentives make them risk-averse. I think they have a stronger incentive to make one failing student do passably well than to make ten students go from doing well to doing very well.
I agree with everything else you said. I also found academic contests to be a good motivator to teach me to check my work.
I think the best way to think about grind, is to imagine "time spent grinding" as a scarce resource.
Your kid only has a very limited amount of it to spend; trying to make them grind more than that amount will be absolutely counter-productive and reduce grind "efficiency" to zero.
Which is exactly what schools do: they try to cram as much working, studying and focusing in a kid's daily life as they can, long past the point of diminishing returns; because they assume that a kid's attention is infinitely extensible, and they do very little to actually get their interest.
When you can order a kid to get into a room at set times and to look at a set piece of text and to listen to a single person for arbitrary amounts of times, there's very little to stop you from making every single day a grind a calling it a job well done.
The main benefit of homeschooling is that, if a kid isn't engaged by the teaching materials, you can see it immediately because they'll say so and ask to do something else.
It doesn't make them go through textbooks. But it doesn't stop them either, and often a decent textbook is the best way to learn about a subject.
As someone who chose to learn some subjects outside of school (usually years before they would have been taught), I tended to read textbooks my older siblings had used—did this for algebra, physics, and calculus—although I didn't do that many problems from the textbooks. (I also read lots of what might be called popular science books.) The article does say "[The McQueen] parents spurn curriculums, textbooks, tests and grades", but I know some unschoolers, and I suspect if I asked them, I would find that they read several textbooks.
One unschooling mom's website quotes (seemingly with approval) another unschooling mom's email on the subject. Ultimately it seems to be saying that, while textbooks shouldn't be the primary tool, they are a tool that is sometimes appropriate. https://sandradodd.com/school/textbooks
I think one of the things the pandemic exposed is how much time is wasted in class for discipline and "class management". Really, without it the quiet kids can pretty much get the regular curriculum in half the normal time.
When you say self-taught do you mean even without using a really good text? Or do you mean that it actually can't be taught without a teacher? If you are saying that math can't be taught without a good teacher I don't really see how that is "known".
Even if it requires a good teacher, does society benefit from forcing it on individuals at a time they don't want to learn it? Or would we be better served by making good teachers available to those who want to learn it, at the time they want to learn it?
I'd -love- to go through some of my college level math classes; both the ones I took, and the ones i didn't need to take. They weren't especially relevant then. They're slightly more now, but more than that, I'm -interested- now. But self-learning takes too much of an investment of time (when I run into something I don't know I have to research -that-, and it becomes this infinite process of diving down rabbit holes, rather than having someone who has gone before who can give me a sufficient answer to unblock me on my original question).
They'd have to write extra code compared to what they have now to do this, and then they've had to support that code. They don't want to. Why on earth should they want to spend time writing code to run other people's businesses that they aren't involved in.
Do you require that McDonald's will sell you a Pepsi, when McDonald's want to sell you Coca-Cola? Do you demand that you should be allowed to set up a Pepsi store inside a McDonalds?
They wouldnt need to write more code, theyd need to remove code. Third party app stores already exist for iOS with no assistance from Apple, they are just prevented from running unless the device is jailbroken.
Granted, they might choose to write some code to manage how these additional stores work, but theres no technical reason I can think of that they would have to.
The MacDonalds its not yours, while your iPhone is.
There's a big difference between the two, and the key difference here is ... Property.
But i like your example because its shows the mindset that the iPhone you bought, is in the end the property of Apple, not really yours, and that you are "fine with it".
You can do already do whatever you want with your phone from the point you receive it in the condition Apple sell it to you.
But you cannot require that Apple do work to build support for third-party app stores. Property rights do not extend to forcing other people to do labour for you.
If your phone doesn't come with support for third-party stores when you buy it then I don't see how it would be your right to have that feature added.
> But you cannot require that Apple do work to build support for third-party app stores. Property rights do not extend to forcing other people to do labour for you.
You and I can't, at least not directly. But governments certainly can, if they deem it in the interest of the citizens they serve.
If you buy a home in a neighborhood with a restrictive homeowners' association covenant, you still own your home even though you're not allowed to paint it blue and put plastic flamingos in the yard. You may not like those restrictions, but they're the restrictions you literally bought into.
I really think this is a more accurate take than "Apple restricts what you can do to your device therefore you don't really own it." Yes, they restrict what I can do with the device, but yes, I really own it. And bonus: f I decide those restrictions are too much to bear, well, buying a new phone is way easier than buying a new house.
Using your analogy, there's is a boundary that can even be considered reasonable. In the example you gave, you know the limits, when you bought and you thought they were reasonable.
But suppose that they define which cars you need to have to live in that neightborhood? You would start to think that now they are being unreasonable..
The thing is, Apple can change those "ok, now this is unreasonable" things behind your back without you even being aware of it. How can you know that you would want that car that the "owners" of your neighborhood did not allowed that car seller to offer you? (And no, this is not a stretch, remember that your digital life is a whole big dimension of your life, imagine a centralized point of control)
You wont feel as you would if they forced you to a limited set of cars, but there are a lot of damages happening by allowing them to do as they please, and not only about your rights as a owner of the product, because there are developers and other technological, social and political issues happening with those decisions being made like that.
Unfortunately it cant be compared as just a house that you have not full control of it, because in that case it would most "damage" you in the end.
The decisions Apple are making hurting digital and material property rights have broader implications to the society in general.
I think this analogy would work if you think in terms of opening a Apple franchise, and being able to sell only Apple products.
The problem here is a centralized point of control, that basically controls, or can eventually exercise this control to define in the end how you experience your life in the digital realm.
As the subtraction, or whats left out, will happen before, people wont even notice whats being taken from them.
That's why its hard to compare to anything that happened before, because its unparalleled.
(a) no smartphone exists that is a perfect fit for my ideal requirements
and
(b) having some smartphone is now almost essential to function normally within society
I would say yes, I absolutely do want the government to intervene. Market competition is obviously not doing the job, and none of us individually is strong enough to force the issue with the suppliers. That is exactly the situation where regulatory intervention is appropriate to protect the little guy from the power of the big guy.
> I absolutely do want the government to intervene
Well I don't know what to say apart from this is incredibly selfish.
You can't find a product suited to your particular esoteric requirements so you want the government to force someone else to perform labour to build the product you want.
Can you see how wacky that sounds when you write it out like that?
By that argument, all consumer protection laws should be abolished. Clearly I don't agree with that position.
I don't think it's selfish to argue that government should protect the little guy from being exploited by the big guy who has much greater power, for each of the numerous little guys affected by a situation. Indeed, that is arguably one of the most important functions of any government.
I would have less of a problem with this if we were discussing some luxury item that people could easily do without. However, the reality is that many organisations -- including government entities at various scales in my country as well as other essential services -- now effectively require the use of certain technologies in order to function as a normal member of society. It is therefore reasonable to ensure that the technologies available are provided on an acceptable basis.
If a supplier doesn't want to play by those rules, they're not forced to perform any labour for me or anyone else here. They're perfectly entitled to simply exit the market instead.
> However, the reality is that many organisations -- including government entities at various scales in my country as well as other essential services -- now effectively require the use of certain technologies in order to function as a normal member of society.
But you can already access these Government services - the apps already work, right? You don't need a third-party-app-store to use them?
So that isn't a reason to change anything.
You want the iPhone to be changed so you can do other things with the iPhone, unrelated to these Government services.
You keep quoting a partial comment and then trying to shift the discussion away from the fundamental point.
The fundamental point is still that, for practical purposes, many people now have to have a smartphone. There are, for practical purposes, two types of smartphone available. If neither of those meets some reasonable conditions that many people would prefer to have -- for example, retaining control of your own device and data -- then this implies a lack of effective competition in the marketplace. Government regulation is the solution to that problem.
Arguing that people don't have to buy the product isn't helpful. Many people are effectively forced into buying one product or the other.
Arguing that people don't have to buy the Apple product isn't helpful. Buying an Android one instead is worse in other respects.
> You keep quoting a partial comment and then trying to shift the discussion away from the fundamental point.
When you try to give a concrete example I show how that concrete example doesn't make any sense to me.
If the fundamental point doesn't translate to any concrete situations then it's a dud.
> neither of those meets some reasonable conditions that many people would prefer to have -- for example, retaining control of your own device and data
But I don't think these are a reasonable conditions.
And I don't think many people want them - I think the number is probably absolutely tiny.
I think using legislation to force Apple to accomodate the unreasonable and abstract preferences of a tiny number of people from a group that isn't specially protected is morally unjust.
But I won't keep arguing it further as I think we probably just have different morals.
But I don't think these are a reasonable conditions.
So we can see. That doesn't mean they wouldn't be in the interests of owners of Apple devices, or that Apple shouldn't be prevented from exploiting its dominant position to restrict the market to the detriment of those owners.
I wonder whether you'd be OK with an electricity supplier saying you're only allowed to plug in equipment they have approved and they can change the rules or revoke approvals any time they like. If you don't like it, you can go to the other electricity supplier, who will give you their list of acceptable equipment instead. If you want to use equipment from both lists, don't worry, just buy two houses. And of course no-one makes any equipment that isn't on either list, because there is no possibility you'd ever want to power anything that wasn't approved by at least one electricity supplier.
Or you can buy Car A that goes only to one set of locations, or Car B that goes only to another set. Other locations might be happy to welcome you, but even if they build the roads to reach them, your car will artificially prevent you from driving that way.
Approximately 200,000 people will die. All of us will know someone that got sick. Most of us will know someone that died. I think Americans will get over it.
I don't know where these numbers come from. But given a the current 1.1% case-fatality-rate in America (even before hospitals are overwhelmed) and that more than half of the population is estimated to get it, I don't see how it'd be less than 1% * .5 * 350million = 1.75 million people, with or without lockdown.
I suspect politicians are trying to "ease into" the honest numbers, because I guess "a million" sounds like a lot to people.
It's hard to say anything with certainty, but I personally can't find any math that explains how social distancing can reduce that by more than 10%, short of a cure or vaccine being developed within 60 days.
I have seen a few seriously sourced articles discussing the possibility of various forms of airborne transmission during certain stages of certain strains. If stuff like this is the reality then the truth is that social distancing can't be as effective as we'd like, even on top of whatever inherent flaws it has, but it's probably still the best/only advice that can actually be given, taking our woeful preparedness into account. Masks probably should have been the recommendation from day 1 but clearly economic priorities and lack of skilled preparation and leadership overruled longer term judgment.
It seems to me some are expecting business as usual to resume quickly because under normal circumstances, where the heads of each department hadn't been chosen for their desire to shut it down ASAP, that is probably more what would happen, but the reality of today's government is vastly different. I completely agree they're trying to slow roll the actual truth here.
That's one theory, but the evidence is mixed. For example, I believe in cruise ships, where everybody was tested the CFR was ~ 3%. However maybe the age distribution was older.
There are a lot of factors, some cause underestimating of cfr (he died of pneumonia, didn't have a test to spare, cause of death pneumonia).
Lockdown requires an eventual vaccine to really save lives, and at minimum universal testing to be effective, to prevent a second wave. Otherwise, once lockdown ends, we go exponential again.
