- ghaffIt could probably be vaguely useful in the kitchen/dining room/mudroom if I had pets/kids. As it is, a broom vac takes just a few minutes. Maybe if I had more day to day mess, I'd feel differently.
- Things were very locked down at the peak of COVID and some of us even semi-officially grumbled a bit to people we knew.
The main public buildings are generally open again during the day at least. I don't go in as much as I used to. (And have ID in any case.) But definitely not as open as it used to be.
- Not that there's not a lot of standardization in Japanese food, but if I order most French dishes, especially in France, I generally have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to get.
One things I've heard about French food (and food supply chains) is that it's something of a monoculture which has both good and not so good aspects.
- My somewhat anecdotal observation is that a lot of access has been tightened down. Some happened during COVID and was just never removed. It definitely varies. The campus I'm most familiar with, you could wander pretty freely and that's less the case today.
- Roombas just weren't that useful for most house layouts and situations (cords/toys/clutter/etc.) I seriously considered getting one and decided it just wouldn't be a win.
- I have found ebooks useful. Especially when I was traveling by air more. But certainly not essential for reading.
- My point was Kindles vanishing, not books vanishing. Kindles are in no way a prerequisite for reading books.
- Kindles are just books and books are already mostly fairly compact and inexpensive long-form entertainment and information.
They're convenient but if they went away tomorrow, my life wouldn't really change in any material way. That's not really the case with smartphones much less the internet more broadly.
- Pretty much. This idea that you can never have done something and get something from a Masterworks is a bit silly. Inside the Actors Studio was great but essentially entertainment. As something that's likely to give any real insight into things you're missing, you probably need to have some experience first.
- There's definitely novelty, fashion, and fads. There's no particular reason why rollerblading essentially went away in the US after being a pretty popular activity for a time. In consumer tech, auction sites didn't go away but they certainly declined.
Sometimes, there are reasons--far fewer people shoot pics with dedicated cameras today for obvious reasons. But sometimes, things that were a novelty just get boring for most.
- Because it wasn't making any money.
- Machine transcriptions are obviously better than they used to be. But requiring perfect human transcriptions in this day and age would IMO be unreasonable for most purposes.
Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.
- And you probably don't have the chops to write screenplays like Aaron Sorkin and almost certainly won't develop them from a video.
- Gym membership for many.
- I agree.
There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents/interest.
But most adults won't have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.
- I largely disagree. If you look at the people involved (and what they said at the time), I think there was a legitimate "We can rethink higher education" which obviously didn't happen for a variety of reasons.
It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.
- It's not clear to me that independent tutors are generally getting rich. But there clearly are activities that benefit from individual training. I imagine music is one of those. But that mostly probably falls into the luxury goods category.
- You need forced exercises, you need grading, you need something of a schedule. Not to say people can't do it. But, especially for difficult material, even a lot of motivated people won't.
I mean I remember what undergrad (and grad school) was like and I'm pretty sure doing that independently and optionally would be tough.
- You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)
- You're probably in the small minority at least when it comes to forking over material dollars. Most people spending money, at least beyond trade paperback range, are probably looking for something that has at least a plausible connection to real income.