In my final year of university during the late 90s, we'd have different companies come in to do presentations on what they do and why we should work for them. Microsoft did a two hour presentation on how great of a place Microsoft is to work at. About a month later Sun came in and did a two hour presentation on how much Microsoft sucks and how stupid you'd have to be to go work there. We learned almost nothing about Sun from their presentation. After that I really started noticing just how much Sun allowed their business decisions to be guided by antagonizing Microsoft rather than providing products and services to their customers. I wasn't surprised at all by their eventual failure.
I spent my childhood in southeast asia. No one was what would be considered anything other than various levels of poor compared to the US.
All of us neighborhood kids ran around in semi-feral packs and played together, being home before night, and I enjoyed it very much. Yes, there was a lot of work to be done. But kids got to be kids, too, and suffered none of the overscheduled insanity I see around me nowadays.
Slight aside- I honestly think that being able to contribute to the household from a young age was good for our mental health, too. Even if (as an example) hunting grasshoppers for a snack was silly fun together, we were proud to hand over our catch, and it felt good to be appreciated by the adults.
It is sometimes used like “lucky” because people who have no idea what it means get it confused with “fortunate” and use the two interchangeably.
If you want to use it to mean “lucky” it should be in the sense of “a purely accidental thing that happened to be good”, not just any good thing that happened.
If I travel to a foreign city on a whim and meet my future spouse there, that might be fortuitous. (It would also be fortuitous if I travel on a whim to a foreign city, get hit by a truck, and end up paraplegic.) If I train for years and finally manage to achieve my dream of running a marathon, that is not fortuitous.
Your link offers the definition “Happening independently of human will or means of foresight; resulting from unavoidable physical causes.”
In many (most?) cases, not becoming addicted to alcohol is a straightforward result of deliberate repeated choices not to consume much alcohol.
There are also people who regularly binge drink and don’t become addicts per se... I guess you could call that both fortuitous and fortunate?
Or we can go all out and deny any human agency or choice, in which case I guess everything becomes fortuitous. This makes the word not very useful though.
What does being white have to do with predominant parenting practices? If you would like to point out differences in parenting practices by race/wealth/class and possible causes for said discrepancies, then please do so.
I mean, considering the era they quoted, I would say that black people might've had a bit more trouble raising kids than white people in the 1950s-1970s for reasons I hope would be incredibly obvious.
Compared to whites in that time period, sure. The raising of kids seems to me to be a multifaceted issue. One interesting example: most would agree that having two parents in a household is better for raising kids. In the early 20th century, despite racism and segregation, black divorce rates and birth outside of wedlock was much lower than it is for blacks today. Of course, those rates have gone up for all races over time but more drastically so for blacks. As a result, the children are often brought up with one parent (which most would agree, means the children are worse off in that respect compared to black children of say 100 years ago). Whether or not this trend is a good or bad thing is a completely different discussion than that of the causality.
Yes, but the point is that the era we tend to romanticize the most with 'free range parenting' tended to be something exclusive to white and/or affluent parents. Black children didn't really have that luxury at the time considering the systemic racism they encountered every step of the way.
As a poor white kid when I grew up my parents didn't have the luxury to let me do my own thing because they were often out fishing for a week+ at a time out in the bay area. So I was either waiting in the dock house playing video games for shorter fishing trips or out there on the boat with them for longer excursions.
I see your point and concur. I do wonder though - in many ways diversity of cultures, nationalities, and races has enriched America and provided many things that other countries simply don't have - does this same diversity also make mixed communities less trusting resulting in less 'free range parenting'?
In other words, whites in that era who practiced 'free range parenting' presumably lived in mostly white communities. If the communities were more mixed at the time, would 'free range parenting' have been as common, even if the affluence and social status of whites was the same?
Another question - what were the parenting techniques like from other races at the time in America? I'm thinking Chinese/Japanese immigrants, Hispanics, Jews, etc. Were well-to-do whites the only ones who largely practiced this style of parenting or were there others?
I sympathize with your intent, but when I was a poorish, urban black kid (30-40 years ago) we were completely free range. I was raised by a single mother who didn't even make it home from work until 7:30-8:00 (like many), and my range was anywhere within a mile or so of my house from probably about 12 years old on.
It wasn't a luxury to be unsupervised... the black people I knew growing up didn't really have a culture of oversupervision to rebel against. We were expected to be able to handle ourselves.
Atmospheric gases under typical conditions behave pretty much like ideal gases, which means it doesn't matter whether you talk about density or molecular mass; they're directly proportional to each other. And the molecular mass is independent of temperature and pressure.
How long does it take to charge? Granted 350 miles is a long trip, but some 9f us drive from Seattle to San Francisco and we can't do that in 350 burst waiting overnight for the car to charge.
Personally I think a hybrid that plugs into 120, with a commuting range 50 miles and a back up gas engine will be the sweet spot
Lithium-ion batteries can be fully charged safely in about an hour, give or take, regardless of their capacity. 80% charge is about half that, IIRC.
The reason it takes a while to recharge EVs is because of the enormous size of their batteries. Tesla Superchargers inject more power into the car than what comes into a regular home.
Quick math: A 100KWh is going to take a bit more than 100KW of power to charge in an hour. For comparison, an oven uses about 3KW...
Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. It slows him down, a very efficient metropolis would be able to cause much more harm at much greater speed. Strategic sabotage can hinder the war efforts, and it doesn't have to be one large bomb, a thousand needle pricks might have an effect, too, and they are much easier to disguise as incompetence.
"Sorry, we didn't mean to put an ad in front of this important information, we just hadn't considered that people coming up the stairs wouldn't be able to read it."
Commute hassle does not come out of productivity. Workers are simply forced to leave their homes earlier and return later, spending less time outside Moloch’s grasp.
Control is both enabling and disabling, depending on the specifics; I think that is an important lesson that can come from looking at "cults".
Examples of enabling control: Learning math was forced on me as a child (unlike reading, I hated doing problems), but its importance to my life cannot be overstated. I join exercise classes to control myself and make sure that I get healthier. Etc. While there is a lot of difference between these and a "cult", I think the point of the OP is that control isn't simply bad.
I think the point of the thread is a discussion of whether "all human organizations exert control..." You disagree, but I think the statement under question is basically correct. Your last reply doesn't add any support to your position.
I hated Panda Express when I lived urban California and there were 1000s of small Chinese canteens, but now I go twice a week. If they had real China (hehe) I would eat there more often, but I just get to go.
This year I overseeded with a mix of ryegrass and clover, will keep my lawn mowed at 2 inches and watered. I hope the clover can bloom at that height and make the bees happy. It should look fine if I keep it at 2 inches every couple of weeks.
