The main failure of the Western world is believing that you're not engaged in abuse of your fellow man just because you outsource poor treatment of workers which you would find unacceptable (and illegal) in your own country.
If WTO wanted to live up to its ostensible aims, it would equalise the playing field across countries by requiring broadly equal worker treatment across countries engaged in free trade. In fact, all it has produced is a careful concoction of newspeak and slave management.
Paid a heck of a lot better than migrant farm worker, miner, sailor, or pretty much anything else at their level of educational and economic sophistication.
There is this tenet in Religious Capitalism that people all moved to the cities during the Industrial Revolution because conditions were better than in the fields.
This is bullshit.
(1) Who do you think owned the fields? Not the peasants who moved to the town. In a lot of cases, landowners made management decisions to push their tenants out because they wanted to reallocate the land. Consider what happened on Skye: the early effects of globalisation and mega-farming.
(2) The myth of the fully informed agent was already in full force. You think these people knew the kind of conditions they would have to face? As always, the pioneers might have had it reasonably good. Do you think a few years later, as supply exceeded demand and conditions became worse, that these former peasants (or their offspring) could just move back to the countryside? A gold rush has one defining feature: in the long run, the majority of players are losers.
The only interesting thing about this book was to find the author's web site and see how many hoops there are nowadays to get through the Yahoo interview process. I've a friend who managed to get a senior sysadmin role at Yahoo a few years ago who can barely program and has no computer science knowledge whatever - his only previous experience was some ISP admin work, although he was a tremendous suck-up to^W^W^Wgood friends with a few core FreeBSD developers. Anyway, I had the impression that the company was a has-been which runs on inertia.
What first world society would be so heartless as to need 13 year old children to work to raise money to look after any infant, let alone one, "Born with just a third of his brain, he has cortical blindness, deafness and has had multiple surgeries for hernias and gastro-intestinal problems"?
They don't want to spy on one person, they want to spy on all people, at the same time. Then they find anyone interesting, gather evidence on them (or plant it) and remove them from being a future problem (permanently if need be). The US may if they really care enough take you to court, the Russians will simply kill you.
Isn't it great when we have some random person on the Internet who is able to paste directly from top-level government strategy manuals! Oh, wait, you're just making stuff up to fit your prejudices.
Fortunately, no-one in the US is killed by cops or subject to an unfair judicial process. And the US military is barely responsible for killing a single human over the last decade.
Look, we can all agree the Russian government is scary. It's just not as scary as the US government. Especially not for foreigners.
As far as I can tell, there is a desire is to ban systems which the Russian government cannot easily eavesdrop on, but there is no aim at "banning encrypted applications".
There are so many examples in the US where the government is keen for you to secure your affairs from crime and hostile foreign involvement - as long as you don't secure them from the US government. For example, you're allowed to keep your money in a bank but the bank is required to report transactions which are "suspicious".
They need pass no law to achieve that, an executive order would be enough.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the current Russian legal system. Would no legislative action be needed to require all government employees and contractors to only communicate work details through government-approved systems?
The proposed ban was against any and all encrypted communications within the territory of Russia where the government has no key escrow.
So the outcome could have been an agreement with Google etc. Either way, use of US services exposes users to snooping from the US government. I don't see any evidence that the people benefit.
There's no education issue here, unless what you mean is that they want to 'educate' Russian students about the benefit of alternatives to Skype and Gmail that the Russian government can intercept.
Or, educating Russian students about the benefit of alternatives to Skype and Gmail that the US government are less likely to be able to intercept. There are more people in the world who distrust the US government than there are people who distrust the Russian government - and if the choice was between a system secured from Russia and a system secured from the US, many would choose the latter. Recall also that a determined Russian official would use the physical presence of a suspect to keylog / warrant search / otherwise anyway, so the value of protection against some form of snooping from one's own government is diminished vs the value of protection against snooping from foreigners.
It's entirely appropriate to ban such services' use in government communications. And any firm of significant size would hopefully implement a similar policy. But if kids want to use Gmail to speak to their friends, I think the government would be better placed to suceed with education than with a ban.
See how ridiculous you become when you try to mock free market?
No. You might as well box the first two paragraphs of your post and caption them "straw man".
I see nothing wrong with letting everyone do anything that does not harm others.
The catch here will be how you define "does not harm others".
I don't agree with taxing people to create goods and services that could be provided voluntarily.
Government and its services are provided voluntarily. How many people are forced to work in government? Or do you mean funded voluntarily? Because the people choose to use what income you regard simplistically as "mine, all mine!" but which is only yours because the same people have decided that you are entitled to some of it.
It's only through GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION that copyrights and patents exist.
It's only through GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION (caps, bold and "write this down carefully" make you sound like an insane zealot) that (i) any sort of property is recognised; and (ii) the scope of property is limited. The free market in pre-Civil War southern states, for example, resulted in the view that some humans could be regarded as property.
It all starts when the will to benefit everyone in the long term turns into the will to make short term personal profit at all costs.
If you think even US success thus far is based on the latter, you ought to read the Constitution. The bits about the purpose and nature of copyrights and patents should be particularly enlightening.
And today we have an easily influenced lockstep generation which has been convinced that man is so degenerate that he is unable to be productive without the incentive of shiny trinkets. Are you one of that generation, mangu? Because people will carry on advancing long after that attitude and the empire which now worships it have enjoyed a well-deserved Ozymandian death.
slow accumulation of social and technological advancements allowed rapid social changes. It's not like ancient Greeks were not smart, but they were limited by their society. A steam engine was invented by Hero but it was only a curiosity back then.
Do you not observe that many inventions were sketched from years to millennia before they were implemented and deployed usefully? We have both the problems of creating something useful out of a vague idea and of convincing others of the utility of some new method. The earlier back you go, the more time you have to complain about how long it took for the semblance of an idea (from philosophical to engineering) to come to something useful.
In this particular case, you're being intellectually dishonest to paint Hero as simply having invented a steam engine before his time. The primitive aeolipile is no Newcomen engine.
And where you may see greater social change, I see social stagnation and homogenisation. We have a century of philosophers who did little more than tweak old ideas. We have a world converging on one ideal. Now, more than ever, we need to look further than our recent past.
Sure. But does the nature of Western thought depend on the date of birth of Alexander The Great? Or exact route of the Ten Thousand?
Of course understanding the nature of Western thought may be improved if you know the date of birth of Alexander or the exact route of the Ten Thousand - more raw data means more opportunity for arrangement and understanding. You are welcome to argue that there are more important data to store in your brain than those facts, IOW you can always look them up where necessary, but (i) looking stuff up wastes time and distracts you from the semi-conscious processing that brains are so good at; (ii) your brain is not filling up any time soon.
Re French border - yes, but why does that make the original shape of Gaul irrelevant? Do you not see that it was the basis for what morphed into modern France, Belgium, etc.?
Re French language - well, I was including Roman Gaul. But it has IIRC been argued that the particular adoption of vulgar Latin was related to the grammatical similarity between Gaulish and Latin, and there are still a few words taken directly from the language.
Re law - again, Roman, "French civil law" being one of the main groups recognised by comparative legal theory.
The formula since the mid-'70s in almost every Western country has been as follows:
Make service bureaucratic and inefficient -> observe cost increase -> reduce service levels rather than bureaucracy -> observe service level reduction -> announce that partnership with private sector will improve service provision -> observe cost increase -> reduce service levels rather than profits -> observe service level reduction -> announce that government is a failure -> sell off everything -> announce record deficit reduction -> declare that your country is free from the tyranny of government -> end up with no service at all.
I envied Soviet school mathematical education, and I hope the standard has been kept. We certainly have nothing so good in England.
Modern history is much more complicated and nuanced.
Nonsense. Do you think man has evolved so much in so short a time that his development could not have been so complicated and nuanced only 2000 years ago? We might have less extant evidence to fully understand the details of classical history, but that merely indicates a challenge - it does not allow us to make any conclusions.
And with much more visible immediate consequences.
Well, "immediate" is vacuous here. As for "visible", it depends on whether you're worried about things like the precise drawing of borders or, say, the nature of Western mathematical thought. For the latter, if we look to but one place then we must look to ancient Greece.
And antic history is mostly a curiosity, as an example, nobody in 1869 cared how large Gaul was
What of the very existence of France? The language it speaks? The form of its legal system?
"No." The answers are either "yes", i.e. you took ten minutes to check your written work with one of many standard references, or "no".
The exam was fiendishly complex. It didn't require anything outside of the high school knowledge (no calculus or differential equations) but was cognitively exhausting.
Even English A levels have basic calculus and differential equations. Hell, my physics exam required it (Nuffield).
For one thing, it was not a test - there were only 6 problems to solve (5 required to get the top mark) and 5 hours of time. Each problem required at least one non-standard creative step.
Good! French or Eastern European, by any chance? UK and US exams have been so routine for so long.
So? Complex arithmetic is still a mechanical skill, which even illiterate people can do (not a conjecture, in the past illiterate people were employed as computers sometimes). By now, it's an obsolete skill.
Every skill is mechanical from the point of view of a sufficiently complex machine. And mental arithmetic is not obsolete! The need to estimate quickly or sanity-check via good mental arithmetic is the difference between a doctor who saves and who kills a patient. And calculation tricks - particularly relevant to the people implementing those computer systems you have decided to rely on - may just be applied number theory / approximation theory / whatever. Human ingenuity tends to be helped by human practitioners.
Nope. I remember historical facts, the driving forces beyond the changes. I can write an essay about the causes beyond the Renaissance or the Revolution in the USA right away. Ask me about the date of Caesar ascension to the throne and I won't be able to say more than "about 50-100 B.C.". For me dates are more important to establish the order of events.
Ignoring that an essay in which your level of precision is "about 50-100 B.C." would be embarrassingly bad (and, for your example, technically wrong), do you understand that the length of events may be as important as their order? Do you also see that, in order to place a new event in your mental order, you actually have to know the dates rather than merely the order of events? Have you never had a History exercise where you are given a dated document and you have to put it into context?
Besides, ancient history is boring.
Modern history is often ancient history repeated. Modern history must thus be even more boring.
The fact that we lost both opening chapters of the space race
The fact that you had a space race is a national shame on both sides.
Imagine if engineers and scientists on each side had been allowed to say to the other, "Dude, let's work together on this one."
And before you respond with the obvious, how many of these engineers and scientists were doing it for the love and glory of mother Russia / America, rather than because they wanted to explore space?
Celebrating the victories of our enemies is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
Deliberately misinterpreting the notions of both "enemy" and "cold war" is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
As for maths, I can solve all the problems in the geometry section right away - and I haven't studied planar geometry since the high school.
Are you sure your answers are sound and complete? Are you happy with the list of assumptions you made?
My entrance exam had waaaaay more complex problems.
Did it have more cognitively challenging problems, or problems requiring more knowledge? In England, a modern mathematics A-level certainly requires more mathematical knowledge, but almost no cognitive ability. I understand that certain northern mainland European countries still have better expectations of their candidates.
I can do arithmetic fairly quickly (we haven't used calculators at school), but that's just a skill to learn. It requires some practice, that's all. Today you can compare it to web browsing.
Web browsing requires very little precision by comparison. There's no equivalent for, say, accidentally 7*8=54 or 10*1000=100000. Yes, it's easy to see the mistake isolated, but trivial errors happen when someone's doing lots of little calculations at speed as part of some larger work - the latter example being the sort which occasionally causes health practitioners to kill patients.
Specific dates and events? Not so much.
And this is a mistake made by every neophyte. All you need is a vague, fuzzy recollection of how and why, right? The details don't matter, just the conclusion, right?
Wrong. Precisely the opposite. To quote a supervisor, you need to be able to see the world "through a grain of sand". Ultimately, any understanding, any conclusion, any modification of an erroneous conclusion comes from an understanding of the specific nuances and context of real events.
What you're advocating is nothing more than learning propaganda, prebuilt hazy sequences which inevitably fit a particular world view. But to be any sort of historian you need begin by being able to identify what actually happened.
In fact, the whole point of basing a lot of the education of the era in a language that is no longer spoken or used was to make sure that only those who could afford to spend their educational time and money on irrelevant subjects could get into the right schools and right jobs.
Do you have any evidence for that?
Me: It provides a useful linguistic and cultural basis for your own life. You: THIS EDUCATION IS A CONSPIRACY.
Dead white guys > Living white guys > Niggers, am I right?
No. In an earlier post, I lament the lack of interest in African culture. Better:
Learning about your own neighbourhood (first) > Learning a broad range of different cultures and systems without value judgements (next step).
What appears to happen (the asterisked categories cater more to geek attitude):
Japan(*) > West is great and free > Russians are evil communists > religions(*)/Arabs [choose one] are evil > we were mean to Africa / India / South America and must put on a guilty face > actually learning about Africa / India / South America.
Exam board and year, please. I did GCSE, AO and several A level mathematics, and there are proofs requested here which I don't recall as coming up on any syllabus. Or do you mean O-level? O-level was righteously more up with geometry.
If you think people in the 19th century could memorise things and people in the 21st can't,
No, my point was that this isn't a trivial exam requiring information that everyone today has already memorised / can intuitively derive, whence an elucidated: "You're all liars."
They're not difficult - they just require memorising.
That cheeky "just" could apply to every known mathematical proof. The problem is that you can't just memorise every existing proof - and without an understanding of proofs I'd argue that the average brain could memorise very little of such, meaning the approach is useless unless you have a very strict syllabus (which crappy modern school exams conveniently do). So mathematical maturity means initially remembering only key steps and tricks, and eventually knowing how to guide your pen into a proof of many well-known results and not even having to explicitly memorise which trick applies for a specific case.
Slashdot Mirror
A man who spends too long looking in the mirror eventually fails to notice himself.
Please, anyone at all? How on earth is this reasonable?
The main failure of the Western world is believing that you're not engaged in abuse of your fellow man just because you outsource poor treatment of workers which you would find unacceptable (and illegal) in your own country.
If WTO wanted to live up to its ostensible aims, it would equalise the playing field across countries by requiring broadly equal worker treatment across countries engaged in free trade. In fact, all it has produced is a careful concoction of newspeak and slave management.
Paid a heck of a lot better than migrant farm worker, miner, sailor, or pretty much anything else at their level of educational and economic sophistication.
There is this tenet in Religious Capitalism that people all moved to the cities during the Industrial Revolution because conditions were better than in the fields.
This is bullshit.
(1) Who do you think owned the fields? Not the peasants who moved to the town. In a lot of cases, landowners made management decisions to push their tenants out because they wanted to reallocate the land. Consider what happened on Skye: the early effects of globalisation and mega-farming.
(2) The myth of the fully informed agent was already in full force. You think these people knew the kind of conditions they would have to face? As always, the pioneers might have had it reasonably good. Do you think a few years later, as supply exceeded demand and conditions became worse, that these former peasants (or their offspring) could just move back to the countryside? A gold rush has one defining feature: in the long run, the majority of players are losers.
The villains are those who buy Murdoch's products.
For example, if you have Sky TV subscription then you are part of the problem. Everything from NotW to Fox News is your fault.
...and it's getting boring to have to read things which imply it.
The only interesting thing about this book was to find the author's web site and see how many hoops there are nowadays to get through the Yahoo interview process. I've a friend who managed to get a senior sysadmin role at Yahoo a few years ago who can barely program and has no computer science knowledge whatever - his only previous experience was some ISP admin work, although he was a tremendous suck-up to^W^W^Wgood friends with a few core FreeBSD developers. Anyway, I had the impression that the company was a has-been which runs on inertia.
What first world society would be so heartless as to need 13 year old children to work to raise money to look after any infant, let alone one, "Born with just a third of his brain, he has cortical blindness, deafness and has had multiple surgeries for hernias and gastro-intestinal problems"?
Why are my new team members so far apart?
Maybe you're putting a bandaid over a symptom, rather than solving the problem.
They don't want to spy on one person, they want to spy on all people, at the same time. Then they find anyone interesting, gather evidence on them (or plant it) and remove them from being a future problem (permanently if need be). The US may if they really care enough take you to court, the Russians will simply kill you.
Isn't it great when we have some random person on the Internet who is able to paste directly from top-level government strategy manuals! Oh, wait, you're just making stuff up to fit your prejudices.
Fortunately, no-one in the US is killed by cops or subject to an unfair judicial process. And the US military is barely responsible for killing a single human over the last decade.
Look, we can all agree the Russian government is scary. It's just not as scary as the US government. Especially not for foreigners.
As far as I can tell, there is a desire is to ban systems which the Russian government cannot easily eavesdrop on, but there is no aim at "banning encrypted applications".
There are so many examples in the US where the government is keen for you to secure your affairs from crime and hostile foreign involvement - as long as you don't secure them from the US government. For example, you're allowed to keep your money in a bank but the bank is required to report transactions which are "suspicious".
They need pass no law to achieve that, an executive order would be enough.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the current Russian legal system. Would no legislative action be needed to require all government employees and contractors to only communicate work details through government-approved systems?
The proposed ban was against any and all encrypted communications within the territory of Russia where the government has no key escrow.
So the outcome could have been an agreement with Google etc. Either way, use of US services exposes users to snooping from the US government. I don't see any evidence that the people benefit.
There's no education issue here, unless what you mean is that they want to 'educate' Russian students about the benefit of alternatives to Skype and Gmail that the Russian government can intercept.
Or, educating Russian students about the benefit of alternatives to Skype and Gmail that the US government are less likely to be able to intercept. There are more people in the world who distrust the US government than there are people who distrust the Russian government - and if the choice was between a system secured from Russia and a system secured from the US, many would choose the latter. Recall also that a determined Russian official would use the physical presence of a suspect to keylog / warrant search / otherwise anyway, so the value of protection against some form of snooping from one's own government is diminished vs the value of protection against snooping from foreigners.
It's entirely appropriate to ban such services' use in government communications. And any firm of significant size would hopefully implement a similar policy. But if kids want to use Gmail to speak to their friends, I think the government would be better placed to suceed with education than with a ban.
See how ridiculous you become when you try to mock free market?
No. You might as well box the first two paragraphs of your post and caption them "straw man".
I see nothing wrong with letting everyone do anything that does not harm others.
The catch here will be how you define "does not harm others".
I don't agree with taxing people to create goods and services that could be provided voluntarily.
Government and its services are provided voluntarily. How many people are forced to work in government? Or do you mean funded voluntarily? Because the people choose to use what income you regard simplistically as "mine, all mine!" but which is only yours because the same people have decided that you are entitled to some of it.
It's only through GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION that copyrights and patents exist.
It's only through GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION (caps, bold and "write this down carefully" make you sound like an insane zealot) that (i) any sort of property is recognised; and (ii) the scope of property is limited. The free market in pre-Civil War southern states, for example, resulted in the view that some humans could be regarded as property.
Go away, read this, then argue with the people who contributed to it. Your opinions and their foundations have been heard and refuted a thousand times.
n/t
It all starts when the will to benefit everyone in the long term turns into the will to make short term personal profit at all costs.
If you think even US success thus far is based on the latter, you ought to read the Constitution. The bits about the purpose and nature of copyrights and patents should be particularly enlightening.
And today we have an easily influenced lockstep generation which has been convinced that man is so degenerate that he is unable to be productive without the incentive of shiny trinkets. Are you one of that generation, mangu? Because people will carry on advancing long after that attitude and the empire which now worships it have enjoyed a well-deserved Ozymandian death.
slow accumulation of social and technological advancements allowed rapid social changes. It's not like ancient Greeks were not smart, but they were limited by their society. A steam engine was invented by Hero but it was only a curiosity back then.
Do you not observe that many inventions were sketched from years to millennia before they were implemented and deployed usefully? We have both the problems of creating something useful out of a vague idea and of convincing others of the utility of some new method. The earlier back you go, the more time you have to complain about how long it took for the semblance of an idea (from philosophical to engineering) to come to something useful.
In this particular case, you're being intellectually dishonest to paint Hero as simply having invented a steam engine before his time. The primitive aeolipile is no Newcomen engine.
And where you may see greater social change, I see social stagnation and homogenisation. We have a century of philosophers who did little more than tweak old ideas. We have a world converging on one ideal. Now, more than ever, we need to look further than our recent past.
Sure. But does the nature of Western thought depend on the date of birth of Alexander The Great? Or exact route of the Ten Thousand?
Of course understanding the nature of Western thought may be improved if you know the date of birth of Alexander or the exact route of the Ten Thousand - more raw data means more opportunity for arrangement and understanding. You are welcome to argue that there are more important data to store in your brain than those facts, IOW you can always look them up where necessary, but (i) looking stuff up wastes time and distracts you from the semi-conscious processing that brains are so good at; (ii) your brain is not filling up any time soon.
Re French border - yes, but why does that make the original shape of Gaul irrelevant? Do you not see that it was the basis for what morphed into modern France, Belgium, etc.?
Re French language - well, I was including Roman Gaul. But it has IIRC been argued that the particular adoption of vulgar Latin was related to the grammatical similarity between Gaulish and Latin, and there are still a few words taken directly from the language.
Re law - again, Roman, "French civil law" being one of the main groups recognised by comparative legal theory.
The formula since the mid-'70s in almost every Western country has been as follows:
Make service bureaucratic and inefficient -> observe cost increase -> reduce service levels rather than bureaucracy -> observe service level reduction -> announce that partnership with private sector will improve service provision -> observe cost increase -> reduce service levels rather than profits -> observe service level reduction -> announce that government is a failure -> sell off everything -> announce record deficit reduction -> declare that your country is free from the tyranny of government -> end up with no service at all.
Enjoy your corporations.
And yes, it was a university in Russia.
I envied Soviet school mathematical education, and I hope the standard has been kept. We certainly have nothing so good in England.
Modern history is much more complicated and nuanced.
Nonsense. Do you think man has evolved so much in so short a time that his development could not have been so complicated and nuanced only 2000 years ago? We might have less extant evidence to fully understand the details of classical history, but that merely indicates a challenge - it does not allow us to make any conclusions.
And with much more visible immediate consequences.
Well, "immediate" is vacuous here. As for "visible", it depends on whether you're worried about things like the precise drawing of borders or, say, the nature of Western mathematical thought. For the latter, if we look to but one place then we must look to ancient Greece.
And antic history is mostly a curiosity, as an example, nobody in 1869 cared how large Gaul was
What of the very existence of France? The language it speaks? The form of its legal system?
Pretty sure.
"No." The answers are either "yes", i.e. you took ten minutes to check your written work with one of many standard references, or "no".
The exam was fiendishly complex. It didn't require anything outside of the high school knowledge (no calculus or differential equations) but was cognitively exhausting.
Even English A levels have basic calculus and differential equations. Hell, my physics exam required it (Nuffield).
For one thing, it was not a test - there were only 6 problems to solve (5 required to get the top mark) and 5 hours of time. Each problem required at least one non-standard creative step.
Good! French or Eastern European, by any chance? UK and US exams have been so routine for so long.
So? Complex arithmetic is still a mechanical skill, which even illiterate people can do (not a conjecture, in the past illiterate people were employed as computers sometimes). By now, it's an obsolete skill.
Every skill is mechanical from the point of view of a sufficiently complex machine. And mental arithmetic is not obsolete! The need to estimate quickly or sanity-check via good mental arithmetic is the difference between a doctor who saves and who kills a patient. And calculation tricks - particularly relevant to the people implementing those computer systems you have decided to rely on - may just be applied number theory / approximation theory / whatever. Human ingenuity tends to be helped by human practitioners.
Nope. I remember historical facts, the driving forces beyond the changes. I can write an essay about the causes beyond the Renaissance or the Revolution in the USA right away. Ask me about the date of Caesar ascension to the throne and I won't be able to say more than "about 50-100 B.C.". For me dates are more important to establish the order of events.
Ignoring that an essay in which your level of precision is "about 50-100 B.C." would be embarrassingly bad (and, for your example, technically wrong), do you understand that the length of events may be as important as their order? Do you also see that, in order to place a new event in your mental order, you actually have to know the dates rather than merely the order of events? Have you never had a History exercise where you are given a dated document and you have to put it into context?
Besides, ancient history is boring.
Modern history is often ancient history repeated. Modern history must thus be even more boring.
The fact that we lost both opening chapters of the space race
The fact that you had a space race is a national shame on both sides.
Imagine if engineers and scientists on each side had been allowed to say to the other, "Dude, let's work together on this one."
And before you respond with the obvious, how many of these engineers and scientists were doing it for the love and glory of mother Russia / America, rather than because they wanted to explore space?
Celebrating the victories of our enemies is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
Deliberately misinterpreting the notions of both "enemy" and "cold war" is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
Trololo, molotov 303.
As for maths, I can solve all the problems in the geometry section right away - and I haven't studied planar geometry since the high school.
Are you sure your answers are sound and complete? Are you happy with the list of assumptions you made?
My entrance exam had waaaaay more complex problems.
Did it have more cognitively challenging problems, or problems requiring more knowledge? In England, a modern mathematics A-level certainly requires more mathematical knowledge, but almost no cognitive ability. I understand that certain northern mainland European countries still have better expectations of their candidates.
I can do arithmetic fairly quickly (we haven't used calculators at school), but that's just a skill to learn. It requires some practice, that's all. Today you can compare it to web browsing.
Web browsing requires very little precision by comparison. There's no equivalent for, say, accidentally 7*8=54 or 10*1000=100000. Yes, it's easy to see the mistake isolated, but trivial errors happen when someone's doing lots of little calculations at speed as part of some larger work - the latter example being the sort which occasionally causes health practitioners to kill patients.
Specific dates and events? Not so much.
And this is a mistake made by every neophyte. All you need is a vague, fuzzy recollection of how and why, right? The details don't matter, just the conclusion, right?
Wrong. Precisely the opposite. To quote a supervisor, you need to be able to see the world "through a grain of sand". Ultimately, any understanding, any conclusion, any modification of an erroneous conclusion comes from an understanding of the specific nuances and context of real events.
What you're advocating is nothing more than learning propaganda, prebuilt hazy sequences which inevitably fit a particular world view. But to be any sort of historian you need begin by being able to identify what actually happened.
Also every piece of information any corporation or state has or can collect on you will end up being used for more than you expected.
If you don't like it, stop developing the tech. Because if it exists, it will be used against you.
In fact, the whole point of basing a lot of the education of the era in a language that is no longer spoken or used was to make sure that only those who could afford to spend their educational time and money on irrelevant subjects could get into the right schools and right jobs.
Do you have any evidence for that?
Me: It provides a useful linguistic and cultural basis for your own life.
You: THIS EDUCATION IS A CONSPIRACY.
Dead white guys > Living white guys > Niggers, am I right?
No. In an earlier post, I lament the lack of interest in African culture. Better:
Learning about your own neighbourhood (first) > Learning a broad range of different cultures and systems without value judgements (next step).
What appears to happen (the asterisked categories cater more to geek attitude):
Japan(*) > West is great and free > Russians are evil communists > religions(*)/Arabs [choose one] are evil > we were mean to Africa / India / South America and must put on a guilty face > actually learning about Africa / India / South America.
I had to memorise them for my GCSEs at age 16.
Exam board and year, please. I did GCSE, AO and several A level mathematics, and there are proofs requested here which I don't recall as coming up on any syllabus. Or do you mean O-level? O-level was righteously more up with geometry.
If you think people in the 19th century could memorise things and people in the 21st can't,
No, my point was that this isn't a trivial exam requiring information that everyone today has already memorised / can intuitively derive, whence an elucidated: "You're all liars."
They're not difficult - they just require memorising.
That cheeky "just" could apply to every known mathematical proof. The problem is that you can't just memorise every existing proof - and without an understanding of proofs I'd argue that the average brain could memorise very little of such, meaning the approach is useless unless you have a very strict syllabus (which crappy modern school exams conveniently do). So mathematical maturity means initially remembering only key steps and tricks, and eventually knowing how to guide your pen into a proof of many well-known results and not even having to explicitly memorise which trick applies for a specific case.