Politics can be a cynical, nasty game, but it's important that everyone believes that the game's rules matter. For a football (soccer) analogy, Nixon was hoping to get away with an intentional handball or studs-up tackle, while Trump is Suarez biting people, or maybe a pitch invasion by angry ultras. None of them are within the rules and should not be tolerated, but some are not even identifiable as football and are way harder to manage than the others.
I fear that he's going to under-perform his party, but still squick out a win. People dislike him almost universally, but the GOP folks who don't respect him can still count on his vote and they know that he will kiss the ring to keep his job.
Also, I've decided "squick" is probably a good verb to use for most things that Ted Cruz does.
Many of the lemmy instances have two or more front-ends available. I find https://photon.lemmy.world/ with the dark them and "List" post style looks pretty nice. There's at least one that just simply replicates old reddit.
kbin.social in particular only has the one admin. I keep an eye on the two ghost-town mags that I mod so they don't become spam vectors, but there's only so much we can do without an admin/dev.
I hate to say it, because I've been really pleased with kbin for the most part. I've liked being able to dip my toes into the Mastodon side without yet another account; I like the interface; and my interactions with Ernest have been nothing but pleasant. I certainly hope all is well with him personally. But whether it's legitimate medical issues or undisclosed burnout, the instance and platform are struggling.
The good thing is that everything has been federating and most of us have been interacting with Lemmy and mbin users daily anyway; it's "just" a loss of fake internet points and comment history to move. I'm trying to put that off, but the mobile site/pwa is only okay, API rollout has stalled (meaning app development has stalled as well), admin activities can't happen with Ernest, and technical issues with the instance are becoming more common.
I think the Reddit API mini-exodus last year hit at that exact "sweet" spot, in terms of numbers and point in kbin development, where one dev/admin could almost keep up with it, but not quite. Suddenly this thing he was noodling with to combine Lemmy and Mastodon has thousands of people wanting it to be production ready. I don't begrudge him anything even if it is just burnout, but if that is the case then maybe it's time to bless mbin as a successor and start migrating people off kbin.social or find someone else to admin it and ugrade it to mbin. Ernest has built up a ton of goodwill; if he's done, then he's done (and of course, if he's ill then he's ill). Who among us could stand up a minimum viable product of a reddit clone and admin two instances? Not me, that's for sure.
Edit: I checked, and Ernest's Polish-language instance karab.in is completely down right now.
We have all been very lucky that these open source projects are there as an alternative, and there are ways Ernest can step back if being the sole PM of a sprawling social network project isn't good for him. I just don't want it to happen in a way where people are left with a bad taste in their mouths for the Fediverse or him personally.
I like The Orville. I've watched the entire run of the show. Much like you with LD though, I don't quite get how people love The Orville. It strikes me as leftover TNG episodes with a Find and Replace, followed by a liberal coat of Seth MacFarlane's very particular set of Gen X influences. The morality is often pretty clumsy and I can almost imagine Seth and the writers being frustrated by the ambiguity that a good Trek episode can leave you with. Then, the way it had to start with a more Galaxy quest vibe to get a show order from Fox, followed by Seth wanting it to be more serious but also still be a Seth show, it's kind of all over the place. I also find some of the acting performances to be amateurish to the point of distraction.
And for all that, I still like it. It scratched an itch and has a lot of heart. On the whole, it's more than the sum of its parts, but for me it still has a ceiling. I like it about as much as I like Discovery, which I have also watched in its entirety though only once. The two shows' issues are very different though, with the exception of tonal whiplash.
I have come around on LD. I think it is a similar love letter to to Gen2 Star Trek but handles the balance of trek-to-humor better, and for all their cartoon antics, I've found the characters more compelling than The Orville's.
Things happen at different paces in different places, and I am about a decadeish older than you, but the broader trend has just been that long form writing will be done on some sort of keyboard, so the purpose that cursive exists to serve mattered less and less. Your experience was a bit different, but I don't know that we're describing completely different trends, neither of which has anything to do with the poor innocent ballpoints, LOL.
In America at least, The headline is just not true. Computers, phones, and tablets are killing cursive, full stop. Ballpoints killed fountain pens as a general purpose writing instrument, it's true, but that was literally fifty years ago in public schools in the US. Cursive however, kept on truckin'. Even in the 80s and 90s, we learned with pencils, and did exams and in-class writing with ballpoints and maybe a fancy-pants rollerball. By college, I was using fountain pens because I'm a dork who never found the obsolete text-generation tool I didn't find interesting, but the rest of my classmates were contentedly doing their papers with their Bics. Even the article from the 60s, cited in the story, was written by a "researcher" who worked for a private company selling handwriting lessons.
It's only as laptops became so common as to be practical and permitted in classrooms that the mindset changed. Keyboarding had a brief heyday as a skill for everyone, but now even that is fading as students are most comfortable with touch-screens of various sizes. My nine year old doesn't touch type, but merely being familiar with the location and uses of the keys on a fullsize keyboard has set her apart among her peers. Her kids will probably wonder how she managed to get along without full-time transcription. Funnily enough, her manuscript is god-awful, with so many unconnected loops and ascenders that a letter could sometimes be any of three or four, but the little bit of cursive they have learned, encouraged by her dear-old chicken-scratch dad, is more legible. I don't want to imply that's the norm, though. Most people's cursive is much harder to decipher without context than their printing. Then, as we write by hand less overall, the need to optimize for speed and comfort becomes less pronounced. Easy, legible letter forms that are just slower to make are fine.
So that being said, are fountain pens in good working order and with ink in them nicer for cursive? Hell yes, of course they are! They were generally built to last, so more thoughtfully designed for a writer, the technology allows for less pressure (though the required pressure for writing on a single piece of paper can sometimes be overstated by us enthusiasts) and more "personality." That said, 95% of people didn't care about any of that enough to want to stick with fountain pens even when ballpoints were less mature than they are now. That was doubly true because we as colelctors have some serious survivors' bias around the brands that have lasted and particularly the vintage pens that hung around. Anything cheaper than an Esterbrook J barely matters to a collector, but that the leaky plastic bananas of many a bulk-lot Ebay listing made up the vast majority of fountain pens most people were dealing with. They are literal garbage now, but they weren't far off back then.
Cursive or print, most people just want a convenient stick to put ink onto paper.
Yeah the article touches on that, as well as the fact that some degrees have you making less (though possibly in a position that is less demanding of your time and/or physicality) than many people without a degree. It also specifically mentions that the benefits are now small enough that the chances of making more have to be weighed against the costs of not finishing or of taking on too much debt for the bump. It then goes into all the ways that the elite schools quietly keep up social barriers (Equestrian scholarships, anyone?). The other big thing is that a sizeable percentage of Republican-leaning people now dismiss college as being nothing more than an indoctrination camp, so that skews the numbers in a weird way. But then, as you say, it remains a basic hurdle to most office jobs or of course to graduate study, hence the rise of nonsense like Liberty University and the continued existence of the University of Phoenix.
We were fortunate enough to be able to invest in a college savings plan for our daughter (yay privilege!), but if we were starting from scratch, I would tell her to try to knock it out of the park in Community College for two years, then apply to a three-tiered set of schools: 2-3 elite places that will open doors (likely off the table when transferring in from CC, but worth it if you can pull it off), the 2-3 best public schools in our state, and 2-3 reputable schools that will be cheapest due to whatever combination of aid, proximity, and in-state tuition brings the bill down. Even with our plan, I'm going to strongly encourage her to use it at a place where it will cover total cost (e.g. 4 years at options 2 and 3 above, no private schools). There is just no more room for romance in choosing your college. Taking out massive debt to go to any place other than those networking factories is just not a prudent economic choice.
While their financial models are a million times more sensible, this is kind of how Europe works already. I'm exaggerating a bit, but if you don't get into Ox-bridge or the Sorbonne or l'Ecole Polytechnique, then you go to class in an office building somewhere near your flat and you get on with life without carrying crippling levels of debt into the workforce. There's no pining for the hallowed halls of Oglethorpe University or Siena College.
True, but there's a certain set of STEM students who resent that their BS degrees are not simply technical certifications. The idea of college is supposed to be that you come out a well rounded person who had exposure to a lot of fields of human endeavor at a sophisticated level compared to high school.
Now, can we argue that not everyone qualified to pursue a technical subject needs a well-rounded education? Sure, but I don't want to work with or for those people. Even for someone who rolled their eyes through English Comp 101, you can expect that they've been taught how to write a damn paragraph and how to engage with a narrative beyond the surface level.
Certainly something in your sidebar. Then, I know /r/askhistorians doesn't spam their podcast, but the mods are very quick to plug it when relevant, so keep an eye out for opportunities. Finally, just be sensible. Most people who are still on Reddit (I still lurk my niche communities) just want content. If there's a reasonable chance to tell them where else has content, some number will respond. I'd say y'all are fairly well equipped to draw in people if you think the Fediverse is THE FUTURE.
