mub

At best it is a technical forum for me. I have an account I’ve used since the days of the great digg migration. A lot of communities grew and became fun but most are now either dead or crap.

You seem to be making my point for me. Human Endeavours don’t need to make a difference, and the difference they do make doesn’t have to affect everyone. In fact if the work makes one person happy, then it is worthwhile.

Sounds like you have taken on a life that means something. My own job is full of bullshit that really doesn’t need to exist, but I give it meaning by mentoring those I lead to drive good changes, and reduce the bullshit. It is a small thing but it is how I make a difference.

You could reduce a lot of the shit we do to effect irrelevance. However, things don’t have to have a profound impact on our lives to be worthwhile endeavours. I love rocket league, a lot of people don’t. A lot of jobs boil down to *meaningless busy work", but some jobs are absolutely essential. Some events have a big influence on limited fields of study, but that doesn’t mean those events can’t impact the wider world. If we discovered aliens once existed on Mars a million years ago it would arguably be irrelevant to our daily lives. But the impact on the world would be earth shattering.

If we only did things that were relevant to the lives of MOST people the world would be a very dull place.

Tl;Dr - you have no soul.

Not sure if you forgot the /s

The back story of humanity is very interesting, and informative. It gives us explanations for how and why we live the way we do today. It shows the basis of our morals and attitudes, and shows us patterns we can learn from.

Dismissing an entire field of study is like kids who hate learning trigonometry or algebra at school because they don’t think they’ll ever use it.

Star wars. Apparently anyone can learn to be a magic user jedi if they try hard enough. But even if that isn’t an option, spaceships are also fun.

I hate to say it but I’ve taken to doing a lot of common searches with bard instead. It is a different experience but more interactive and easier to refine. It gets stuff wrong but compared to a basic Google search Bard is more useful.

I feel like Google is just a directory for looking up web sites now.

Will the first thing would be to Google how to date 2 women at once.

Indeed. Uniform or, not, per person will exist. I just think we are better off without uniforms, and we should always work towards “no uniform”.

Funnily enough one of the things you can be sure of, is girls all want to look the same, but also be somehow better dressed than their friends. You are right that kids want expensive stuff and parents try to provide where they can. Whether this leads to bullying depends on a bunch of other factors. Kids who bully will do so either way, uniform or not.

Yes. The junior school my kids went to has uniform. The senior school was not. I realise that is not quite the same thing though. That said I have a mix my friends had a mix of uniform and non-uniform schools, and their kids also are mix. Across the board the opinion from parents and children is uniforms are old fashioned and need to go.

That said there are undoubtedly regional issues, and the areas I, my kids, my friends, and their kids are in tend towards the middle-class and up, in terms of affluence. That would suggest a degree that affluence dictates behaviour, which is unfair because each school is different and the social background of the students doesn’t always tell you if the school is a nice place or not.

The studies around behaviour and uniform have found that uniform does play a part sometimes, but usually there are other route causes and attacks related to the clothes the kids wore was just a symptom of other issues. So the lack of a uniform does not tell you if behaviour is going to be good or bad in a school. Schools have other tools that are more effective at handling behavioural issues, and some schools just have a harder time due to their location.

I worked at a school in Leeds a few years ago. They closed 3 other schools and brought together 3 different racial groups into a new single school. It was a nightmare at first but over time has improved to the point they no longer need a permanent police presence. This school has a uniform, but I highly doubt that had anything to do with their troubles.

Thank you. Well said! I usually feel like the lone voice of reason against people who roll out the usual bullshit about uniforms.

Total tosh. Those are the dogmatic points people have been rolling out for years without any basis in fact. The “great leveler” theory was useful post War when the differences were obvious, but they are largely irrelevant today.

The “Sense of community” is always translated by kids as “forced to conform to what their parents did”. They don’t want that, and frankly most people who want to feel free to express themselves don’t want it either. The wardrobe malfunction stuff is true for uniforms as well, especially if you are a 14yo girl (parents of daughters will understand). The same is true for basically all of the points you made. And body image problems are often made a lot worse by NOT having freedom to choose what you want to wear. Also, studies looking at uniform vs educational outcomes have never found statistical meaningful correlations for our against uniforms.

These days schools in the UK only have uniforms due to a tradition introduced for reasons no longer relevant today.

Tldr: uniforms are an anachronism, used as means of constraining and controlling kids, and reminding them who is in charge.

Very long; reading if you like:

Using uniforms to disguise the differences between rich and poor was a post War idea that made a lot of sense in the UK. The introduction of public schools at the time brought kids together from a wide range of backgrounds just when those differences were very obvious. It all made a lot of sense. Also, English private schools had famously used uniforms as it created a certain image that they wanted. To a degree this is now true of public schools, and the “tradition” of wearing uniforms is often given as a reason to keep them.

In the UK, in 2024, there are always kids wearing uniforms that are unwashed, need repairing, or just the wrong size. But even without those signs the kids all know who is rich and who is not.

If you take kids out of their uniforms and let them wear their preferred clothes, the differences between become very hard to spot. Back in 1942 this was not true, but today you’d be hard pushed to tell who is rich and who is not making the original purpose irrelevant.

To setup a study of the impact of uniforms is logistically impossible, however all studies that look at educational outcomes found no correlation between uniform and exam results. This seems to disprove the claim that uniforms allow kids to do better in class.

Today, schools like to have uniforms for a few reasons. One, they claim it is part of the school identity, which is true to a degree. But it came about due to national hardship, and is a reminder of times we no longer need. Two, school rules on uniforms have always existed but have become more strict in recent years (speaking as a UK parent of 3 kids aged 12, 16, & 25). In the school my kids attend(ed), they will send letters home and punish kids for uniform related infractions the moment they happen. However, they don’t do the same for education related issues. It took 2 years for them to report the issues my daughter was having, and they seemed more concerned with her earnings than her school work when we spoke with them.

Dropping uniforms would reduce the load on teachers who would not need to constantly monitor and punish kids for wearing the wrong shoes, or coats, or bags, or having earrings even. There would still be some rules but they would allow far more latitude for self expression and freedom that kids in 2024 require. And this is an important point. For good or bad, modern children are exposed to information, news, behaviours, and attitudes from around the world, from a very early age. They are also going through the universal issues of adolescence. We need to accept they need freedom to express themselves, not find ways to constrain them.

On a side note, it is my own view that some schools are scared of giving kids freedom to choose, and the uniform rules are intended as a way to make them “conform” to a conservative standard. Uniform rules are effectively a stick they can smack kids with. Take it away and you take their power.

::: He gets free in the end if I remember correctly. :::

Close. Add the game Twister, and you’ve got it.

When you Google a technical thing you could use the whole sentence like “in a bash session how would you pipe the output from cat to something else?” But that is long winded and can be constraining for the search engine so you boil it down to just the essential words". Start with “how to” then add “bash Cat pipe”, and insert “with” because that is the desired adjective.

I’ve just woken up and I’m wondering if I missed an implied /s. Anyway.

That “if” can apply to the high price brand as well. If you know you won’t use the item a lot, going for off brand is a reasonable approach.

If you have a dishwasher, do NOT rinse things before putting them in. Just scrape off the bits into the bin. A big part of the efficiency of a dishwasher comes from not running more water or the water heater unnecessarily. If you rinse you might as well hand wash.

Smeeeegheeaaad!

Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite, would you like a toasted tea-cake?