Vegetarian and vegan diets tend to consist of bread, pasta, rice, all sorts of fake processed shit, and ironically, very little actual vegetables. And there's good reason for that. It's exceptionally difficult to meet one's caloric needs on vegetables alone. Grains are nutritionally bankrupt, except for calories. Vegetarians, in order to meet their nutritional needs, need to either be rather careful to make sure they are getting sufficient nutrients, or eat processed, fortified crap.
I actually agree with you about the deficiencies in vegan diets (see my previous post on this thread), but you are really overstating your case here. I don't know any vegans who eat like you describe, and the few vegetarians I know who eat like this are stupid. (For the record, I'm an omnivore.)
It is difficult to meet calorie needs on vegetables, but with fruits too, the calorie quantity goes up significantly.
Grains are not "nutritionally bankrupt" -- only processed things like white flour, white rice, etc. are. Most actual vegans I know eat all sorts of whole grains (whole-grain wheat, rye, barley, oats, quinoa, millet, sorghum, barley, amaranth, etc.). These can't provide all nutrients, but they are a heck of a lot better than white bread or white rice. Add in some seeds or nuts to these grains to make bread, and you end up with something that actually has quite a bit of nutrition.
I notice that you completely omit beans and legumes, which are an essential part of vegan and vegetarian diets, and a place where a lot of protein and nutrients absent from grains comes from.
For vegetarians that supplement a diet of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds with some milk and a few other derived animal products, there is rarely any problem in creating a balanced diet. For strict vegans, getting enough calcium, vitamin D, and sometimes iron (and a couple other random minerals) can be an issue, and it does require care.
The only major issue that will require supplements or fortified food is B12.
I'm not saying there aren't people who eat only "bread, pasta, rice, all sorts of fake processed ****, and... very little vegetables." But that is not representative of any vegans I know, who in general tend to eat much more wholesome grain products and other food than the omnivores I know.
There are jerks everywhere who believe in everything. I do think the jerks tend to be more vocal when they feel like they are in the dominant culture -- vegans in a crunchy part of a hip town will look down a little more on meat eaters, while vegans in "barbecue country" might have to deal with some banter and mild insults.
But sometimes people are just jerks. And they can be unpleasant, no matter what their beliefs.
In the end, people in the world are different. It's the people who don't accept that who make life unpleasant for everyone. If the vegan mentioned had been relatively laid-back during lunch, but still asked a few questions of a server, it might have gotten everyone talking. Maybe some people might have even been convinced to cut down on meat or try some sort of vegetarianism or something. At a minimum, you could have had an interesting philosophical debate, but if you all were pleasant people, you could eventually just accept things and move on and have a good time. If someone didn't want that or was too offended by someone else's behavior, he or she should have simply excused him/herself from the future lunches.
Unfortunately, I've noticed that most people tend to just get very nervous when anyone actually wants to talk about these things beyond just declaring what their own behavior is. I tend to eat very little meat, but I don't object to it occasionally, nor do I view either side to be fundamentally flawed. But I've occasionally had conversations with stricter vegetarians and vegans where I just tried to sort out what they believed, and they got very anxious -- even though I was just asking out of curiosity.
The problem, in the end, is that for many people this is sort of a gut instinct that tells them which way to go, just like some people are drawn to particular religions or whatever. They just feel it is wrong to eat cuddly things or whatever, and someone probing their views makes them nervous... just as if you started asking someone about "why" they go to church, and why that particular church, or why they believe in some political perspective.
Vegetarians and vegans seem to have a little more of this sort of complex, in my experience, because their perspective is not the dominant one in the U.S. For some people, that insecurity leads to acting out like out like you describe.
Milk is vegan, if the animal you obtain it from, consents to give it to you...[snip] But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.
The problem with these arguments is where you stop. Many strict vegans I know won't eat honey, because the bees aren't consenting to give up their honey. I've even heard vegans argue about whether we can eat yeasted bread -- or is it "exploiting" the yeast to make it rise for us?
And, of course, once you're getting to the level of yeast, the whole animal/plant thing starts to break down. Why not talk about exploiting the lettuce by tearing off its leaves, exploiting the carrot by stealing its roots. These are essential parts of the plant. Even if you eat only fruit, you should be sure to protect the scattering of the seeds to be sure you're not interfering with natural reproduction.
I'm not at all saying there is anything wrong with being vegetarian or vegan. But everyone has to draw some sort of line somewhere, and it's always going to be arbitrary. Everything below that line is open to exploitation, and everything above that line should be protected.
I don't mean to be cynical, but the vast majority of vegetarians I've talked to don't have any depth to their philosophy. It's usually about some sort of worry about cuddly things; hence, many are happy to eat fish. Others (usually more principled) extend it to all vertebrates, some go down as far as bees and silk worms. In the end, many discuss things like "sentience" and ability to "feel" pain, but even most plants will react (slowly, admittedly) to any significant damage -- isn't that proof that they don't "like" what we are doing to them?
In the end, all of this talk about "consent" and "sentience" and "exploitation" and whatever usually goes out the window the moment an ugly (but often harmless) spider is crawling up your kid's back, and you swat the damn thing down and step on it.
well, one easy standard to apply is "would they do were it not forced on them?"
I don't think that's the standard that most strict vegans use. Most strict vegans I know don't eat honey, but the bees will keep making it, regardless of what is "forced" upon them. The bees are "free" to leave. (I'm aware that they stay due to the presence of the queen, but the queen could theoretically leave too... but the bees just like making honey in that environment.)
Anyhow, I think the real vegan rationale is more like some sort of perceived "exploitation." That's a subjective term, but I think that's really what's going on in vegan philosophy. The animals might make the food anyway, but we are exploiting them to make food for us.
Of course, we also exploit plants too when we harvest parts of them like leaves or roots, which they have to regrow (or perhaps they even die or are completely consumed). Even by eating the fruit and not letting the seeds be dispersed naturally, we often interfere with reproduction.
The problem with all of these arguments is that you can keep going and going until you can't eat anything because you're exploiting it. I've even heard some vegans have arguments about whether we can eat leavened bread -- aren't you "exploiting" the yeast??
The question is just where you stop, because you have to eat something, and generally speaking, you'll end up exploiting or killing something else in the process... no matter what it is.
The scientific research says that vegetarian and vegan diets adequately meet nutritional needs and are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including infancy and early childhood (American Dietetic Association)
That can be so, but it requires a little bit of care in diet planning and usually some supplements. Vegan diets often lack B12 almost completely, and without being careful, they can lead to deficiencies in iron, calcium, vitamin D, and other things. (The latter stuff can be found by eating the right vegan foods in sufficient quantity, but B12 is really a problem without supplements or fortified food.)
I'm not saying anything bad about vegan diets. But it is actually significantly harder to get adequate quantities of certain nutrients than with omnivorous diets or even vegetarian diets.
And before someone suggests that the American Dietetic Association is not qualified to make that determination.
The association has 72,000 members and ~72% are registered dietitians and ~50% of those hold advanced degrees.
While I fully admit there are a lot of smart people involved in nutrition science, we just need to look at the HUGE swings in suggested diets that have been recommended by the "experts" for the past century and a half to see that there's a problem. Adequate nutrition is hard to quantify, and it is certainly more than just a few vitamins and minerals (which is why we see new "essential" things coming up all the time... antioxidants, fatty acids, probiotics, etc., etc.).
The fact is that most diets where you eat a wide variety of foods that are relatively non-processed can probably be healthy. But some restrictions on variety may make it harder to "balance" things than others, including strict veganism.
Oh, and by the way, I agree with you that money is not "speech." That's the real problem.
On the other hand, no lawyers on either side in the Citizens United case tried to argue that corporations don't have free speech. Of course they do. All the assertions to the contrary about "natural persons" and whatever are just propaganda spun by people who don't have a clue about the law and were upset that they lost the case.
The question argued by the lawyers in the case was whether the restrictions on speech were justified in this case, just as in your examples of shouting "fire," etc. No one was arguing that corporations don't have free speech; the question whether this was fair regulation.
The only hope to maintain a democratic republic is to pass a constitutional amendment saying that only human beings have individual human rights. All you'd have to do is change "persons" to "natural persons" a few places in the constitution and we guarantee at least the possibility of something like democratic institutions.
Umm, the text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see "person" or "persons" mentioned anywhere regarding religion or speech or the press. It's just that Congress shouldn't make laws restricting these rights: the Constitution actually doesn't specify who has them. The idea that groups of people somehow didn't have these rights before is just not in the text. "The people" get the right to assemble and petition, and since these are both rights that actually only make sense in a group, it hardly makes sense to restrict them to individual persons.
Actually, same with religion and the press. Religion requires a group for a religion to exist and have free exercise, and, at least in the 1700s, it wasn't really feasible for a single person to run a press by himself except in very unusual circumstances. So, once again, we're talking about groups of people.
I'm not saying we should let corporate donations take over our political system. But the ridiculous argument that somehow groups of people, whether organized into a legal entity or not, don't have rights to act collectively is just stupid propaganda. The only right you could really restrict to individuals from the First Amendment is speech, which would make your proposal a huge exception to the rest of the text. By default, groups of people retain the rest of the rights.
I weigh the pros and cons and do a bit of research, and yes, this includes any and all apps I may want to use.
That's a pretty high cost. A bit like living in a ghetto, and having to consider your personal safety every time you go out, versus living in a nice, safe, pleasant community.
Freedom is having the choice to live in the nice, safe community but also being allow to choose which community you live in, and also what communities you might want to visit -- maybe that ghetto has a great restaurant and a cool club, and you know that it's safe to visit them under certain conditions.
Fascism (Apple) is being told that only one community exists, and by the way, here is the homeowner's contract with all the ridiculous conditions. "Oh, you don't want to pay for the pool? Oh, you want to put a pink flamingo in your yard? Sorry. There isn't anywhere else for you to go. You have to live here. Oh, and by the way, our community is safe, but we also have cameras up to spy on you all the time, even in your bathroom. Oh, and if you press the wrong button in the bathroom, those camera feeds can be viewed by a lot of other people too."
Really... buying an app is like going anywhere and buying anything. When you buy from your local Mom and Pop retail store, you might trust them to have products that work correctly, don't break easily, etc. But you have to build up that trust by having a relationship with the store. On the internet, things are much worse, because the products aren't vetted by the local store. Hence, most people read a bunch of reviews on Amazon or whatever before they make a purchase, because there are a lot of crap products out there. The only difference with apps seems to be that they are so cheap that people don't think they should have to vet them.
Really, it's like going anywhere on the internet, where you're likely to have cookies and scripts and requests from all sorts of third parties doing all sorts of things with your data (unless you install a battery of browser plugins and police everything in detail).
Are these models perfect? No. But if you're going out anywhere on the internet without a "bulletproof vest" in the form of plug-ins that basically make the internet non-functional, you're already visiting a ghetto far worse than a lot of malware. And if you install anything on any device without understanding what it is, there's a similar problem.
The solution to the app problem is easy, and it has been around for a long time. Freeware and shareware have existed on the internet for decades now, and within a few years after the start of the WWW, some websites became trusted repositories for getting "clean" applications. If you went outside those trusted places, you'd better know what you're doing.
What the iStore does is a good service, but the problem is that you shouldn't be locked into relying on their terms and conditions (which may be more restrictive than some people would like in some ways, but much more lax than people would like in other ways). If I choose to use a different repository with different standards, I should be able to, and I can build up my feeling of trust with them, just as I would with my local Mom and Pop retail store. If I just download an app from some random place I've never heard of, I'd better vet it thoroughly first.
Yep. Send an actual physical letter, or try a phone call.
Or, better yet, if you have a major complaint about a topical issue that's in the news, write something good and send it to your local newspaper as a Letter to the Editor.
I mostly received form letters in response to most queries I made, but a couple times when my letter to the local paper was published, I got personalized letters dealing with details of the specific issue from both my local state senator and my U.S. Congressman sent to me in response.
The more public the method of communication, the more likely you'll get a response. And choose a method that is less likely for thousands of other people to use.
Hey paranoid mods -- just so you know, this is a quote from the paranoid thriller "Enemy of the State." It's meant to be funny... or at least ironic, given TFA.
We dont care if you strip us down and shove a data tracker striaght up our ass, just give me more internet.
Umm, I think people actually would care, if they realized what was going on. Outside of Slashdot and other (reasonably) paranoid communities, few people realize the extent to which they are tracked.
If your web browser had a giant banner that appeared for every cookie, third-party script, random third-party request, etc. that was going on for most websites, I'd bet people would care, because they would actually know what's going on.
To most people, however, this is invisible. They can't be outraged if they don't understand the magnitude of the problem.
What have we come to when the educational courses are free and the NY Times article telling you about them is behind a paywall?
Most employers will care a lot of if you have a nice piece of paper that has "Stanford" and "Bachelor of Science" on it. They won't yet care as much if you took some random free online course. But, of course, to get the Stanford piece of paper, you need to shell out 6 figures.
Just saying that it is easier and cheaper (if you consider your time as money, I do) to eat fast food vs anything else.
Only if you don't count the years taken off your life by eating unhealthy food. If you eat crap, have a heart attack at 55, and die 30 years earlier than you might eating better food, you'll lose a lot more than those 43 extra minutes spent cooking each day. (Of course, this won't happen to everyone, but the more crap you eat, the more you roll the dice.)
And as for efficient use of time, make large batches and freeze them. Often it may take you 45 minutes to make one meal, but maybe only an hour to turn that recipe into 10 meals. Then you're talking about 5 minutes or so per meal, which gets you much closer to Jack in the Box convenience. (This is a trick used by households with two working parents for a long time.)
Sure, for many things frozen isn't the same as fresh, but if you choose recipes well, it can be really good. And, Jack in the Box is probably worse than most frozen homemade meals anyway....
Also my year 45 dollars will be worth a lot more than my current year 32 dollars when I'm living year 65.
Sorry, but what the heck are you talking about?
I agree that if the interest rate on your debt is higher than you could get in investments, pay down the debt first. That's a no-brainer. But at current interest rates, I'd try to get that interest rate for your debt lowered somehow.
Anyhow, your "current day millions" won't be worthless in 35 years if you invest them in anything that can at least keep pace with inflation. With even a minimal investment strategy, you should be able to beat inflation by at least a few percent, which means by the time you're 45, your "year 32 dollars" will be worth a lot more in "year 45 dollars" than the money you're actually earning in "year 45 dollars."
Example: inflation rates for the past century have averaged between 3 and 4%, so let's just say 3.5%. If you have a moderate allocation for an investment portfolio (nothing crazy or risky), you should be able to get at least double that annual return. Let's say you manage to get 7% on average.
You're now 32. You invest $1000. When you are 45 years old, at 7% growth rate, you will have $2410.
Meanwhile, inflation grows at about 3.5%, so $1000 in year 32 dollars is now $1564 in year 45 dollars.
For every dollar you invested in year 32 dollars, you now have 2410/1564 = $1.54 in year 45 dollars.
It's a good idea to pay down debt, but the other assertions you make about how your current dollars will be worth nothing in the future are just silly.
Do that many people just now watch tv/movies on little computer monitors, rather than have a nice, large TV or two in the house?
Meh. Some people care more about the overall quality of the experience, rather than the size of the equipment.
Most TV and most films are crap. I don't need crap magnified for me in high fidelity to know what it is. This may not apply to you, but I have noticed a disturbingly high correlation between people with enormous TVs and people who like to watch crap movies mostly consisting of stuff blowing up.
High definition is a bonus to a viewing or listening experience, but it's one of the least important to me. Not important enough for me to shell out thousands of dollars certainly... not even enough to shell out the money for a modern digital flat screen -- I only have one because I was given it as a gift.
But then again, I also think some Classical recordings from the 1940s, or some jazz from the 1930s, or even some Dixieland from the 1920s are fantastic, even though their sound quality, according to modern standards, is complete crap. Some of my favorite classic films (and certainly much classic TV) aren't high enough quality in their original form to even benefit from an enormous monstrosity like your TV.
If I had oodles of money to burn and a small theater in my house, I might invest in a giant TV. But 97% of my viewing experience is based on other things, whose quality is much more important to me.
Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
That is true. However, if the results aren't firm, it is dishonest to present them as a major discovery. Lots of people are looking to make their results sound much more significant than they are to secure more grants or even to try to a hit in the media. The pressure isn't just to publish quickly, but also to publish ostentatiously. This leads to crazy conclusions and discussion sections that have little relationship to a reasonable interpretation of the significance of the data.
The greater problem (in my view) isn't outright fraud or even incompetence in results that brings about a retraction -- it's gross exaggeration of the significance of results. (Most of the time, this won't even lead to a retraction.) Those unreliable "conclusions" often influence how future research is done, what is assumed knowledge in the field, etc.
Discover something marginal with real research, then use photoshop and obscure statistical methods to make it look like you have a real discovery. Make outlandish claims about the prospect of your discovery revolutionizing everything.
This is so true, particularly in small or relatively new fields, and particularly in the "softer" sciences. I took a course a few years back concerning a relatively small subfield of cognitive studies (an area which intersects with another obscure discipline), and the instructor assigned a half dozen papers to read each week, and class members would present a summary.
Basically, the instructor ended up using the primary literature of the field to show us how not to do good scientific research. About 90% of the time someone would point out a major "significant" correlation, the instructor would ask: but how many correlations did they try? Sometimes, there would be dozens and dozens of potential correlations checked in the article, and the one or two that actually worked would be touted as of "major significance."
Except when you try that many things, chances are something's going to correlate with something else. If you set your threshold at 95% confidence (common in soft science experiments where you don't have enough funding to get a lot of subjects), you'll get a correlation from random data about 1 out of 20 times. If you do dozens of correlations, you'll always find something.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The experiments were often poorly designed, because as an interdisciplinary subfield, most of the researchers didn't actually understand both areas that well. But the ambiguous manipulation of data then was generally used to justify the most absurd claims in the discussion section -- sweeping generalizations about how these findings might revolutionize our understanding of how the brain works or some other incredibly broad statement (usually false on its face, because the experiment was almost always so badly designed that it couldn't even say anything about the tiny subfield itself).
And then -- the worst part. Future articles would propagate the absurd sweeping conclusions from the discussions sections as if they were fact. A decade later, many of these claims had become "accepted knowledge" in the field.
I'd say about 75% of the articles we looked at -- and almost all of them were frequently cited and published in the central journals of the field -- were guilty of some sort of extreme bias in experiment design, data manipulation, or grossly exaggerated conclusions.
I know these things are far less frequent in the "hard" sciences, but the things I took away from this course were (1) how to read scientific articles carefully, and (2) there's a lot of crap being published out there that is barely "scientific."
Umm, no. The "Friend" feature arrived pretty darn early. It was originally limited to HARVARD e-mail addresses (then other elite schools and eventually all.edu), because they were trying to get elite students on first so it would be cool and a place to socialize and hook up. Professors were very rare on Facebook for the first 3-4 years it existed, so it was not at all designed as a way for them to communicate. It was always about socialization, just first among elite college students.
I'm not sure what there is in your reply that makes what I said "incorrect." Wei admits to telling other people, and she admits to spying further after Ravi left, along with some of her friends. I'm not sure this action by Wei can be blamed fully on Ravi, since he wasn't there. And I did mention the tweeted invitation to a subsequent viewing that never happened -- and if it didn't happen, there was no further invasion of privacy. (Again, I think Ravi was a jerk -- but let's just get the facts straight about what he actually did...)
According to every dictionary I look at, "film" means to make a movie or photograph of (i.e., to record something). Take a look at some; you might learn something. In the case under discussion, we're talking about a webcam, which by default does not make a recording (unless set to do so) -- it merely transmits from one computer to another. There is no evidence that a recording was made, kept, or broadcast to anyone else. Again, I'm not defending these actions at all, but thr conduct in question is more similar to using a telescope to view a neighbor you might not otherwise see than it is to "filming" them.
I am not at all defending Ravi's conduct, which appears to have been despicable.
However, you might want to read up on the case you're ranting about before telling other people about their ignorance.
the harassment, intimidation and embarrassment of his "outing" pushed him over the edge.
If your spouse videotapes their spouse while they are with their adulteress/adulterer (let's not imply it's always the guy who cheats, okay) in their bedroom and broadcasts it to the world... we might feel it was justified.
As a well-researched recent New Yorker article pointed out: There was no recording. There was no broadcast. And the victim was already "out." With this knowledge of what actually happened in the case, please feel free to modify your rant as appropriate.
Who exactly is "you guys"? At no point did I ever defend Ravi's actions in any way.
permission to watch or film
See, you're doing it too -- "film" implies a recording. There is no evidence that there was ever a recording, and there certainly was never a broadcast.
Ravi's actions are clearly wrong and probably illegal. I did not and will not defend them in any way. However, most of the outrage about this case rests on a rumor that Ravi recorded and spread a video across the internet. This is not true. What he did was the equivalent of a roommate and a friend surreptitously opening the roommate's door and peering in for a few seconds.
This is undoubtedly a breach of trust, and it is certainly wrong. But I do think the reactions of many posts here and elsewhere are distorted by the belief that Ravi did further more egregious things that he did not do. I think fairness and ethics requires us to judge him on what he actually did, rather than what the internet imagines that he did.
That real issue here is not that Ravi recorded an intimate moment and broadcast it,
Can we clear up one thing that was repeated all over the internet and is still being repeated here:
There was no "broadcast."
Ravi and one friend viewed something through a webcam for a few seconds. After that, on a subsequent evening when Ravi was asked to stay out of the room, he tweeted that he was going to set up a public viewing. For various reasons that I've read in conflicting accounts, this more public viewing never happened. (I believe Ravi claims he decided not to do it long before the time came.)
So, the "invasion of privacy" seems to be based on two people across the hall spying through a webcam for less than a minute. This was certainly a jerk thing to do, but is it much different from two people across the hall quietly opening the door and peaking in? How many college students do this to spy on a roommate?
I'm not speaking about possible bias or motivation or whatever, but the invasion of privacy did NOT involve a recording or broadcast, at least according to reliable news sources I've read.
OK, the 12-5 is a pretty sad example, but generally I must say that mental arithmetic is over-rated.
Perhaps, but the GP was talking about basic multiplication. I had a few students who got to a third year of high school math without being able to do one or two digit addition or subtraction without a calculator. Can you at least see how that sort of deficiency makes it nearly impossible to come up with useful example problems to teach higher level math?
I'm an aeronautical stress engineer; mental arithmetic just isn't reliable enough or applicable to most problems. Beyond coarse sense checks (if you can simplify your arithmetic to something that's within 50% of the answer, you have an idea whether a mistake has been made), you don't show off with mental gymnastics, you do it properly and reliably: with a calculating device.
Frankly, if you're really an aeronautical stress engineer, you scare the crap out of me. If you don't have at least a rough intuition about numbers, you're absolutely right -- you can't do estimations to check the sensibility of an answer.
And if that's true, you can't evaluate the output of your "calculating device." It is no more reliable than your ability to use it properly, and if you make an error somewhere, it really helps to have a little alarm bell that goes off in your head and says, "Wait a sec -- I thought I did the heat transfer coefficient properly, but I can't actually cook a turkey in a home oven in 1.83 seconds!"
The most worrisome problem I see in students today who are completely dependent on calculators is that they also generally have absolutely no sense of whether the magnitude of their answer is even in the right ballpark. They just take whatever comes up on their calculator screen as the truth... never considering that they might have made a mistake in entering numbers or in the way they used their calculator to compute the answer.
Of course, there are plenty of gifted students who manage to figure such things out, but having basic intuition about numbers is part of basic numeracy. And you only get there by memorizing at least a few basic facts in the beginning... there may be no point in being able to multiply two 4-digit numbers in your head, but there is a point in being able to carry out a computation with roughly 1-digit accuracy to do an order-of-magnitude check... and that requires basic arithmetic competency.
Just use the same textbooks as 30+ years ago. Pre-university mathematics hasn't changed that much.
Actually, it has.
No, actually it hasn't. I speak as someone who took high school math near the beginning of the age of the graphing calculator, and as someone who has taught high school math in the years since.
Yes, you can teach algebra in different ways with graphing calculators, and there are many innovative things that I've done with them in the classroom to make things easier to visualize. However, for perhaps 97% of the exercises, students could have done these things pretty easily without graphing calculators 30 (or 50 or 100) years ago... and that includes sketching graphs, etc.
You happen to pick one of the relatively few tasks that occurs in a basic algebra curriculum where some sort of statistical analysis application really makes it possible to assign more than one such problem, and most kids just plug the numbers into a calculator today. Previously, linear regression problems would be saved for dedicated stats courses. Once one gets to calculus, graphing calculators are helpful for visualizing more obscure functions, but for the most part, students of yesteryear could graph sketches of many of those functions too. They just didn't do it as often because it was either inaccurate or a lot of work.
I'm not saying the way we teach math hasn't changed. But I am saying that you could take maybe 95% or more of the exercises in a textbook from 50 years ago, and they would still be relevant today -- some could be done in different ways (and often more efficiently with a calculator), but the same exercises and outline of topics are still useful. You might also selectively skip some parts of the textbook that are less useful with new technology.
As for the remaining 3-5%, teachers could easily supply some additional exercises that would make use of calculator features that make previously cumbersome tasks manageable.
Slashdot Mirror
Vegetarian and vegan diets tend to consist of bread, pasta, rice, all sorts of fake processed shit, and ironically, very little actual vegetables. And there's good reason for that. It's exceptionally difficult to meet one's caloric needs on vegetables alone. Grains are nutritionally bankrupt, except for calories. Vegetarians, in order to meet their nutritional needs, need to either be rather careful to make sure they are getting sufficient nutrients, or eat processed, fortified crap.
I actually agree with you about the deficiencies in vegan diets (see my previous post on this thread), but you are really overstating your case here. I don't know any vegans who eat like you describe, and the few vegetarians I know who eat like this are stupid. (For the record, I'm an omnivore.)
It is difficult to meet calorie needs on vegetables, but with fruits too, the calorie quantity goes up significantly.
Grains are not "nutritionally bankrupt" -- only processed things like white flour, white rice, etc. are. Most actual vegans I know eat all sorts of whole grains (whole-grain wheat, rye, barley, oats, quinoa, millet, sorghum, barley, amaranth, etc.). These can't provide all nutrients, but they are a heck of a lot better than white bread or white rice. Add in some seeds or nuts to these grains to make bread, and you end up with something that actually has quite a bit of nutrition.
I notice that you completely omit beans and legumes, which are an essential part of vegan and vegetarian diets, and a place where a lot of protein and nutrients absent from grains comes from.
For vegetarians that supplement a diet of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds with some milk and a few other derived animal products, there is rarely any problem in creating a balanced diet. For strict vegans, getting enough calcium, vitamin D, and sometimes iron (and a couple other random minerals) can be an issue, and it does require care.
The only major issue that will require supplements or fortified food is B12.
I'm not saying there aren't people who eat only "bread, pasta, rice, all sorts of fake processed ****, and... very little vegetables." But that is not representative of any vegans I know, who in general tend to eat much more wholesome grain products and other food than the omnivores I know.
There are jerks everywhere who believe in everything. I do think the jerks tend to be more vocal when they feel like they are in the dominant culture -- vegans in a crunchy part of a hip town will look down a little more on meat eaters, while vegans in "barbecue country" might have to deal with some banter and mild insults.
But sometimes people are just jerks. And they can be unpleasant, no matter what their beliefs.
In the end, people in the world are different. It's the people who don't accept that who make life unpleasant for everyone. If the vegan mentioned had been relatively laid-back during lunch, but still asked a few questions of a server, it might have gotten everyone talking. Maybe some people might have even been convinced to cut down on meat or try some sort of vegetarianism or something. At a minimum, you could have had an interesting philosophical debate, but if you all were pleasant people, you could eventually just accept things and move on and have a good time. If someone didn't want that or was too offended by someone else's behavior, he or she should have simply excused him/herself from the future lunches.
Unfortunately, I've noticed that most people tend to just get very nervous when anyone actually wants to talk about these things beyond just declaring what their own behavior is. I tend to eat very little meat, but I don't object to it occasionally, nor do I view either side to be fundamentally flawed. But I've occasionally had conversations with stricter vegetarians and vegans where I just tried to sort out what they believed, and they got very anxious -- even though I was just asking out of curiosity.
The problem, in the end, is that for many people this is sort of a gut instinct that tells them which way to go, just like some people are drawn to particular religions or whatever. They just feel it is wrong to eat cuddly things or whatever, and someone probing their views makes them nervous... just as if you started asking someone about "why" they go to church, and why that particular church, or why they believe in some political perspective.
Vegetarians and vegans seem to have a little more of this sort of complex, in my experience, because their perspective is not the dominant one in the U.S. For some people, that insecurity leads to acting out like out like you describe.
Milk is vegan, if the animal you obtain it from, consents to give it to you ...[snip] But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.
The problem with these arguments is where you stop. Many strict vegans I know won't eat honey, because the bees aren't consenting to give up their honey. I've even heard vegans argue about whether we can eat yeasted bread -- or is it "exploiting" the yeast to make it rise for us?
And, of course, once you're getting to the level of yeast, the whole animal/plant thing starts to break down. Why not talk about exploiting the lettuce by tearing off its leaves, exploiting the carrot by stealing its roots. These are essential parts of the plant. Even if you eat only fruit, you should be sure to protect the scattering of the seeds to be sure you're not interfering with natural reproduction.
I'm not at all saying there is anything wrong with being vegetarian or vegan. But everyone has to draw some sort of line somewhere, and it's always going to be arbitrary. Everything below that line is open to exploitation, and everything above that line should be protected.
I don't mean to be cynical, but the vast majority of vegetarians I've talked to don't have any depth to their philosophy. It's usually about some sort of worry about cuddly things; hence, many are happy to eat fish. Others (usually more principled) extend it to all vertebrates, some go down as far as bees and silk worms. In the end, many discuss things like "sentience" and ability to "feel" pain, but even most plants will react (slowly, admittedly) to any significant damage -- isn't that proof that they don't "like" what we are doing to them?
In the end, all of this talk about "consent" and "sentience" and "exploitation" and whatever usually goes out the window the moment an ugly (but often harmless) spider is crawling up your kid's back, and you swat the damn thing down and step on it.
well, one easy standard to apply is "would they do were it not forced on them?"
I don't think that's the standard that most strict vegans use. Most strict vegans I know don't eat honey, but the bees will keep making it, regardless of what is "forced" upon them. The bees are "free" to leave. (I'm aware that they stay due to the presence of the queen, but the queen could theoretically leave too... but the bees just like making honey in that environment.)
Anyhow, I think the real vegan rationale is more like some sort of perceived "exploitation." That's a subjective term, but I think that's really what's going on in vegan philosophy. The animals might make the food anyway, but we are exploiting them to make food for us.
Of course, we also exploit plants too when we harvest parts of them like leaves or roots, which they have to regrow (or perhaps they even die or are completely consumed). Even by eating the fruit and not letting the seeds be dispersed naturally, we often interfere with reproduction.
The problem with all of these arguments is that you can keep going and going until you can't eat anything because you're exploiting it. I've even heard some vegans have arguments about whether we can eat leavened bread -- aren't you "exploiting" the yeast??
The question is just where you stop, because you have to eat something, and generally speaking, you'll end up exploiting or killing something else in the process... no matter what it is.
The scientific research says that vegetarian and vegan diets adequately meet nutritional needs and are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including infancy and early childhood (American Dietetic Association)
That can be so, but it requires a little bit of care in diet planning and usually some supplements. Vegan diets often lack B12 almost completely, and without being careful, they can lead to deficiencies in iron, calcium, vitamin D, and other things. (The latter stuff can be found by eating the right vegan foods in sufficient quantity, but B12 is really a problem without supplements or fortified food.)
I'm not saying anything bad about vegan diets. But it is actually significantly harder to get adequate quantities of certain nutrients than with omnivorous diets or even vegetarian diets.
And before someone suggests that the American Dietetic Association is not qualified to make that determination. The association has 72,000 members and ~72% are registered dietitians and ~50% of those hold advanced degrees.
While I fully admit there are a lot of smart people involved in nutrition science, we just need to look at the HUGE swings in suggested diets that have been recommended by the "experts" for the past century and a half to see that there's a problem. Adequate nutrition is hard to quantify, and it is certainly more than just a few vitamins and minerals (which is why we see new "essential" things coming up all the time... antioxidants, fatty acids, probiotics, etc., etc.).
The fact is that most diets where you eat a wide variety of foods that are relatively non-processed can probably be healthy. But some restrictions on variety may make it harder to "balance" things than others, including strict veganism.
Oh, and by the way, I agree with you that money is not "speech." That's the real problem.
On the other hand, no lawyers on either side in the Citizens United case tried to argue that corporations don't have free speech. Of course they do. All the assertions to the contrary about "natural persons" and whatever are just propaganda spun by people who don't have a clue about the law and were upset that they lost the case.
The question argued by the lawyers in the case was whether the restrictions on speech were justified in this case, just as in your examples of shouting "fire," etc. No one was arguing that corporations don't have free speech; the question whether this was fair regulation.
The only hope to maintain a democratic republic is to pass a constitutional amendment saying that only human beings have individual human rights. All you'd have to do is change "persons" to "natural persons" a few places in the constitution and we guarantee at least the possibility of something like democratic institutions.
Umm, the text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see "person" or "persons" mentioned anywhere regarding religion or speech or the press. It's just that Congress shouldn't make laws restricting these rights: the Constitution actually doesn't specify who has them. The idea that groups of people somehow didn't have these rights before is just not in the text. "The people" get the right to assemble and petition, and since these are both rights that actually only make sense in a group, it hardly makes sense to restrict them to individual persons.
Actually, same with religion and the press. Religion requires a group for a religion to exist and have free exercise, and, at least in the 1700s, it wasn't really feasible for a single person to run a press by himself except in very unusual circumstances. So, once again, we're talking about groups of people.
I'm not saying we should let corporate donations take over our political system. But the ridiculous argument that somehow groups of people, whether organized into a legal entity or not, don't have rights to act collectively is just stupid propaganda. The only right you could really restrict to individuals from the First Amendment is speech, which would make your proposal a huge exception to the rest of the text. By default, groups of people retain the rest of the rights.
I weigh the pros and cons and do a bit of research, and yes, this includes any and all apps I may want to use.
That's a pretty high cost. A bit like living in a ghetto, and having to consider your personal safety every time you go out, versus living in a nice, safe, pleasant community.
Freedom is having the choice to live in the nice, safe community but also being allow to choose which community you live in, and also what communities you might want to visit -- maybe that ghetto has a great restaurant and a cool club, and you know that it's safe to visit them under certain conditions.
Fascism (Apple) is being told that only one community exists, and by the way, here is the homeowner's contract with all the ridiculous conditions. "Oh, you don't want to pay for the pool? Oh, you want to put a pink flamingo in your yard? Sorry. There isn't anywhere else for you to go. You have to live here. Oh, and by the way, our community is safe, but we also have cameras up to spy on you all the time, even in your bathroom. Oh, and if you press the wrong button in the bathroom, those camera feeds can be viewed by a lot of other people too."
Really... buying an app is like going anywhere and buying anything. When you buy from your local Mom and Pop retail store, you might trust them to have products that work correctly, don't break easily, etc. But you have to build up that trust by having a relationship with the store. On the internet, things are much worse, because the products aren't vetted by the local store. Hence, most people read a bunch of reviews on Amazon or whatever before they make a purchase, because there are a lot of crap products out there. The only difference with apps seems to be that they are so cheap that people don't think they should have to vet them.
Really, it's like going anywhere on the internet, where you're likely to have cookies and scripts and requests from all sorts of third parties doing all sorts of things with your data (unless you install a battery of browser plugins and police everything in detail).
Are these models perfect? No. But if you're going out anywhere on the internet without a "bulletproof vest" in the form of plug-ins that basically make the internet non-functional, you're already visiting a ghetto far worse than a lot of malware. And if you install anything on any device without understanding what it is, there's a similar problem.
The solution to the app problem is easy, and it has been around for a long time. Freeware and shareware have existed on the internet for decades now, and within a few years after the start of the WWW, some websites became trusted repositories for getting "clean" applications. If you went outside those trusted places, you'd better know what you're doing.
What the iStore does is a good service, but the problem is that you shouldn't be locked into relying on their terms and conditions (which may be more restrictive than some people would like in some ways, but much more lax than people would like in other ways). If I choose to use a different repository with different standards, I should be able to, and I can build up my feeling of trust with them, just as I would with my local Mom and Pop retail store. If I just download an app from some random place I've never heard of, I'd better vet it thoroughly first.
Yep. Send an actual physical letter, or try a phone call.
Or, better yet, if you have a major complaint about a topical issue that's in the news, write something good and send it to your local newspaper as a Letter to the Editor.
I mostly received form letters in response to most queries I made, but a couple times when my letter to the local paper was published, I got personalized letters dealing with details of the specific issue from both my local state senator and my U.S. Congressman sent to me in response.
The more public the method of communication, the more likely you'll get a response. And choose a method that is less likely for thousands of other people to use.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Hey paranoid mods -- just so you know, this is a quote from the paranoid thriller "Enemy of the State." It's meant to be funny... or at least ironic, given TFA.
We dont care if you strip us down and shove a data tracker striaght up our ass, just give me more internet.
Umm, I think people actually would care, if they realized what was going on. Outside of Slashdot and other (reasonably) paranoid communities, few people realize the extent to which they are tracked.
If your web browser had a giant banner that appeared for every cookie, third-party script, random third-party request, etc. that was going on for most websites, I'd bet people would care, because they would actually know what's going on.
To most people, however, this is invisible. They can't be outraged if they don't understand the magnitude of the problem.
What have we come to when the educational courses are free and the NY Times article telling you about them is behind a paywall?
Most employers will care a lot of if you have a nice piece of paper that has "Stanford" and "Bachelor of Science" on it. They won't yet care as much if you took some random free online course. But, of course, to get the Stanford piece of paper, you need to shell out 6 figures.
The "paywall" is in education too.
Just saying that it is easier and cheaper (if you consider your time as money, I do) to eat fast food vs anything else.
Only if you don't count the years taken off your life by eating unhealthy food. If you eat crap, have a heart attack at 55, and die 30 years earlier than you might eating better food, you'll lose a lot more than those 43 extra minutes spent cooking each day. (Of course, this won't happen to everyone, but the more crap you eat, the more you roll the dice.)
And as for efficient use of time, make large batches and freeze them. Often it may take you 45 minutes to make one meal, but maybe only an hour to turn that recipe into 10 meals. Then you're talking about 5 minutes or so per meal, which gets you much closer to Jack in the Box convenience. (This is a trick used by households with two working parents for a long time.)
Sure, for many things frozen isn't the same as fresh, but if you choose recipes well, it can be really good. And, Jack in the Box is probably worse than most frozen homemade meals anyway....
Also my year 45 dollars will be worth a lot more than my current year 32 dollars when I'm living year 65.
Sorry, but what the heck are you talking about?
I agree that if the interest rate on your debt is higher than you could get in investments, pay down the debt first. That's a no-brainer. But at current interest rates, I'd try to get that interest rate for your debt lowered somehow.
Anyhow, your "current day millions" won't be worthless in 35 years if you invest them in anything that can at least keep pace with inflation. With even a minimal investment strategy, you should be able to beat inflation by at least a few percent, which means by the time you're 45, your "year 32 dollars" will be worth a lot more in "year 45 dollars" than the money you're actually earning in "year 45 dollars."
Example: inflation rates for the past century have averaged between 3 and 4%, so let's just say 3.5%. If you have a moderate allocation for an investment portfolio (nothing crazy or risky), you should be able to get at least double that annual return. Let's say you manage to get 7% on average.
You're now 32. You invest $1000. When you are 45 years old, at 7% growth rate, you will have $2410.
Meanwhile, inflation grows at about 3.5%, so $1000 in year 32 dollars is now $1564 in year 45 dollars.
For every dollar you invested in year 32 dollars, you now have 2410/1564 = $1.54 in year 45 dollars.
It's a good idea to pay down debt, but the other assertions you make about how your current dollars will be worth nothing in the future are just silly.
Do that many people just now watch tv/movies on little computer monitors, rather than have a nice, large TV or two in the house?
Meh. Some people care more about the overall quality of the experience, rather than the size of the equipment.
Most TV and most films are crap. I don't need crap magnified for me in high fidelity to know what it is. This may not apply to you, but I have noticed a disturbingly high correlation between people with enormous TVs and people who like to watch crap movies mostly consisting of stuff blowing up.
High definition is a bonus to a viewing or listening experience, but it's one of the least important to me. Not important enough for me to shell out thousands of dollars certainly... not even enough to shell out the money for a modern digital flat screen -- I only have one because I was given it as a gift.
But then again, I also think some Classical recordings from the 1940s, or some jazz from the 1930s, or even some Dixieland from the 1920s are fantastic, even though their sound quality, according to modern standards, is complete crap. Some of my favorite classic films (and certainly much classic TV) aren't high enough quality in their original form to even benefit from an enormous monstrosity like your TV.
If I had oodles of money to burn and a small theater in my house, I might invest in a giant TV. But 97% of my viewing experience is based on other things, whose quality is much more important to me.
Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
That is true. However, if the results aren't firm, it is dishonest to present them as a major discovery. Lots of people are looking to make their results sound much more significant than they are to secure more grants or even to try to a hit in the media. The pressure isn't just to publish quickly, but also to publish ostentatiously. This leads to crazy conclusions and discussion sections that have little relationship to a reasonable interpretation of the significance of the data.
The greater problem (in my view) isn't outright fraud or even incompetence in results that brings about a retraction -- it's gross exaggeration of the significance of results. (Most of the time, this won't even lead to a retraction.) Those unreliable "conclusions" often influence how future research is done, what is assumed knowledge in the field, etc.
Discover something marginal with real research, then use photoshop and obscure statistical methods to make it look like you have a real discovery. Make outlandish claims about the prospect of your discovery revolutionizing everything.
This is so true, particularly in small or relatively new fields, and particularly in the "softer" sciences. I took a course a few years back concerning a relatively small subfield of cognitive studies (an area which intersects with another obscure discipline), and the instructor assigned a half dozen papers to read each week, and class members would present a summary.
Basically, the instructor ended up using the primary literature of the field to show us how not to do good scientific research. About 90% of the time someone would point out a major "significant" correlation, the instructor would ask: but how many correlations did they try? Sometimes, there would be dozens and dozens of potential correlations checked in the article, and the one or two that actually worked would be touted as of "major significance."
Except when you try that many things, chances are something's going to correlate with something else. If you set your threshold at 95% confidence (common in soft science experiments where you don't have enough funding to get a lot of subjects), you'll get a correlation from random data about 1 out of 20 times. If you do dozens of correlations, you'll always find something.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The experiments were often poorly designed, because as an interdisciplinary subfield, most of the researchers didn't actually understand both areas that well. But the ambiguous manipulation of data then was generally used to justify the most absurd claims in the discussion section -- sweeping generalizations about how these findings might revolutionize our understanding of how the brain works or some other incredibly broad statement (usually false on its face, because the experiment was almost always so badly designed that it couldn't even say anything about the tiny subfield itself).
And then -- the worst part. Future articles would propagate the absurd sweeping conclusions from the discussions sections as if they were fact. A decade later, many of these claims had become "accepted knowledge" in the field.
I'd say about 75% of the articles we looked at -- and almost all of them were frequently cited and published in the central journals of the field -- were guilty of some sort of extreme bias in experiment design, data manipulation, or grossly exaggerated conclusions.
I know these things are far less frequent in the "hard" sciences, but the things I took away from this course were (1) how to read scientific articles carefully, and (2) there's a lot of crap being published out there that is barely "scientific."
Umm, no. The "Friend" feature arrived pretty darn early. It was originally limited to HARVARD e-mail addresses (then other elite schools and eventually all .edu), because they were trying to get elite students on first so it would be cool and a place to socialize and hook up. Professors were very rare on Facebook for the first 3-4 years it existed, so it was not at all designed as a way for them to communicate. It was always about socialization, just first among elite college students.
I'm not sure what there is in your reply that makes what I said "incorrect." Wei admits to telling other people, and she admits to spying further after Ravi left, along with some of her friends. I'm not sure this action by Wei can be blamed fully on Ravi, since he wasn't there. And I did mention the tweeted invitation to a subsequent viewing that never happened -- and if it didn't happen, there was no further invasion of privacy. (Again, I think Ravi was a jerk -- but let's just get the facts straight about what he actually did...)
According to every dictionary I look at, "film" means to make a movie or photograph of (i.e., to record something). Take a look at some; you might learn something. In the case under discussion, we're talking about a webcam, which by default does not make a recording (unless set to do so) -- it merely transmits from one computer to another. There is no evidence that a recording was made, kept, or broadcast to anyone else. Again, I'm not defending these actions at all, but thr conduct in question is more similar to using a telescope to view a neighbor you might not otherwise see than it is to "filming" them.
However, you might want to read up on the case you're ranting about before telling other people about their ignorance.
the harassment, intimidation and embarrassment of his "outing" pushed him over the edge.
If your spouse videotapes their spouse while they are with their adulteress/adulterer (let's not imply it's always the guy who cheats, okay) in their bedroom and broadcasts it to the world ... we might feel it was justified.
As a well-researched recent New Yorker article pointed out: There was no recording. There was no broadcast. And the victim was already "out." With this knowledge of what actually happened in the case, please feel free to modify your rant as appropriate.
You guys seem to forget
Who exactly is "you guys"? At no point did I ever defend Ravi's actions in any way.
permission to watch or film
See, you're doing it too -- "film" implies a recording. There is no evidence that there was ever a recording, and there certainly was never a broadcast.
Ravi's actions are clearly wrong and probably illegal. I did not and will not defend them in any way. However, most of the outrage about this case rests on a rumor that Ravi recorded and spread a video across the internet. This is not true. What he did was the equivalent of a roommate and a friend surreptitously opening the roommate's door and peering in for a few seconds.
This is undoubtedly a breach of trust, and it is certainly wrong. But I do think the reactions of many posts here and elsewhere are distorted by the belief that Ravi did further more egregious things that he did not do. I think fairness and ethics requires us to judge him on what he actually did, rather than what the internet imagines that he did.
That real issue here is not that Ravi recorded an intimate moment and broadcast it,
Can we clear up one thing that was repeated all over the internet and is still being repeated here:
There was no "broadcast."
Ravi and one friend viewed something through a webcam for a few seconds. After that, on a subsequent evening when Ravi was asked to stay out of the room, he tweeted that he was going to set up a public viewing. For various reasons that I've read in conflicting accounts, this more public viewing never happened. (I believe Ravi claims he decided not to do it long before the time came.)
So, the "invasion of privacy" seems to be based on two people across the hall spying through a webcam for less than a minute. This was certainly a jerk thing to do, but is it much different from two people across the hall quietly opening the door and peaking in? How many college students do this to spy on a roommate?
I'm not speaking about possible bias or motivation or whatever, but the invasion of privacy did NOT involve a recording or broadcast, at least according to reliable news sources I've read.
OK, the 12-5 is a pretty sad example, but generally I must say that mental arithmetic is over-rated.
Perhaps, but the GP was talking about basic multiplication. I had a few students who got to a third year of high school math without being able to do one or two digit addition or subtraction without a calculator. Can you at least see how that sort of deficiency makes it nearly impossible to come up with useful example problems to teach higher level math?
I'm an aeronautical stress engineer; mental arithmetic just isn't reliable enough or applicable to most problems. Beyond coarse sense checks (if you can simplify your arithmetic to something that's within 50% of the answer, you have an idea whether a mistake has been made), you don't show off with mental gymnastics, you do it properly and reliably: with a calculating device.
Frankly, if you're really an aeronautical stress engineer, you scare the crap out of me. If you don't have at least a rough intuition about numbers, you're absolutely right -- you can't do estimations to check the sensibility of an answer.
And if that's true, you can't evaluate the output of your "calculating device." It is no more reliable than your ability to use it properly, and if you make an error somewhere, it really helps to have a little alarm bell that goes off in your head and says, "Wait a sec -- I thought I did the heat transfer coefficient properly, but I can't actually cook a turkey in a home oven in 1.83 seconds!"
The most worrisome problem I see in students today who are completely dependent on calculators is that they also generally have absolutely no sense of whether the magnitude of their answer is even in the right ballpark. They just take whatever comes up on their calculator screen as the truth... never considering that they might have made a mistake in entering numbers or in the way they used their calculator to compute the answer.
Of course, there are plenty of gifted students who manage to figure such things out, but having basic intuition about numbers is part of basic numeracy. And you only get there by memorizing at least a few basic facts in the beginning... there may be no point in being able to multiply two 4-digit numbers in your head, but there is a point in being able to carry out a computation with roughly 1-digit accuracy to do an order-of-magnitude check... and that requires basic arithmetic competency.
Just use the same textbooks as 30+ years ago. Pre-university mathematics hasn't changed that much.
Actually, it has.
No, actually it hasn't. I speak as someone who took high school math near the beginning of the age of the graphing calculator, and as someone who has taught high school math in the years since.
Yes, you can teach algebra in different ways with graphing calculators, and there are many innovative things that I've done with them in the classroom to make things easier to visualize. However, for perhaps 97% of the exercises, students could have done these things pretty easily without graphing calculators 30 (or 50 or 100) years ago... and that includes sketching graphs, etc.
You happen to pick one of the relatively few tasks that occurs in a basic algebra curriculum where some sort of statistical analysis application really makes it possible to assign more than one such problem, and most kids just plug the numbers into a calculator today. Previously, linear regression problems would be saved for dedicated stats courses. Once one gets to calculus, graphing calculators are helpful for visualizing more obscure functions, but for the most part, students of yesteryear could graph sketches of many of those functions too. They just didn't do it as often because it was either inaccurate or a lot of work.
I'm not saying the way we teach math hasn't changed. But I am saying that you could take maybe 95% or more of the exercises in a textbook from 50 years ago, and they would still be relevant today -- some could be done in different ways (and often more efficiently with a calculator), but the same exercises and outline of topics are still useful. You might also selectively skip some parts of the textbook that are less useful with new technology.
As for the remaining 3-5%, teachers could easily supply some additional exercises that would make use of calculator features that make previously cumbersome tasks manageable.