America is a toilet

[Knuckle 484]

year/month/day would be the most accurate, this is true, but I was looking at it as a choice between day/month/year and month/day/year. What I've been taught to do is keep different years in their own folders anyway so they never really have a chance to throw a wrench in the system. But yeah, you're right, and maybe everyone should just switch to year/month/day anyway since it seems like the perfect combination of usefulness in certain fields and is also understandable.

 

Sorry about missing the part at the end with the computer files comment though.

[Sahaqiel 1232]

'sall good dawg

 

If you have different folders for years, Month - Day is pretty much just an extension of year-month-day, but for everyday life, day-month-year is the way to go, since we mostly operate in the present. Like, the number of times you have to check the day vastly outweighs the number of times you check the month, which vastly outweighs the number of times you check the year, etc. So unless you're fishing through older documents, the year should be the least important part of your dating system, because it's the one that changes the least, and the day should be the most important, for the opposite reason.

[Ammonsa 308]

Thanks for the big post on interpreting History, Knuckle, it's really insightful

Yeah, I think driving on the other side of the road is just a preference thing now, and most of the world is right side anyway, its something the rest of us would probably do well to change over.

[LLmao ?✊? 1276]

I get stressed out trying to even imagine how an entire nation would switch from driving in the left lane to the right. And I'm sure my knowledge is limited anyway. The current roads wouldn't have to be destroyed, but surely they'd need changes. Like imagine gradually shutting down Tokyo's roads in pieces at a time until the changes were all made.

Also, on a note more related to the thread: all of these attitudes about changing nations and "streamlining" things are incredibly white and European ideas, I hope you know. I know that none of you are going to invade another country or anything, but this thread is imperialistic as puppy. It's my belief that "streamlining" things in these ways is how you kill culture. Just saying. If it became the standard in the US to use Celsius, I am not going to mourn the loss of my heritage or anything.

It's small, seemingly harmless attitudes like these that lead to being a dick. Not that anyone of you are dicks. Maybe we don't even realize that it's happening.

Edited 11 Feb 2014 by °ᵕ° (see edit history)

[Sahaqiel 1232]

My argument is that culture, in this case, is prioritizing the past over the future. No one complains that Europe switched to metric, and they're the ones who came up with imperial. This is an issue of educating children to actually understand what they're using and to use the same standards so things that actually matter, for instance, engineering things that are responsible for human lives, is something that's mutually and easily understood across the board. NASA lost 125 million dollars because some engineers were using imperial and others were using metric-- and we're one of like three countries that don't use metric. Pi is a horrible way to learn things. Priority in spelling is completely dumb and arbitrary because spelling changes all the time, and they're just symbols that represent sounds, but not really, because those rules are so flexible they shouldn't even be called rules?

 

Preserving culture should be the job of historians and anthropologists; culture is and always has been flexible. It's not a sacred idea. We should not be bogged down by primitive practices. We don't still use stone tools to cut our food because that's how our ancestors did it. Surgeons nowadays don't keep the blood on their tools to prove their experience like they supposedly did before microbe theory. Progress is in finding better ways to do something, and that's the issue here. We still haven't moved onto what is objectively a better practice in an age where we believe that our education system is broken and limping. I don't really know about driving on whatever side of the street, since I can't find an immediate reason to prioritize one lane or the other, but as far as everything else I've mentioned, I don't think there's a reason we shouldn't make a change.

 

Education should be about teaching people what actually matters. It's unfair to say it's a white and European idea, too. Math doesn't have a race. My qualms about spelling are directed almost entirely at languages that European-decent people use. Metric is a standard that everyone else uses. Clearing hurdles in the way of education isn't a white idea, it's a sensible idea, and I wish people would stop pushing culture as an excuse to stay in lesser conditions. I'm not saying we should abolish holidays or destroy historical documents, and in fact, this argument sprang from the notion that we should accurately represent history. Why is teaching children about how much of a douchebag Christopher Columbus really was a loss of culture? Why is false embellishment and celebration of a mass-murderer supposed to be part of our culture? Why is teaching children that the US isn't the only side of the coin a loss of culture? We're like a watered-down North Korea, taught to think our nation is the best and all our wrongs were justified by what we made right. "Manifest destiny" was a vocabulary word in my middle school textbooks-- the belief that white settlers should take over North America from the east to west coast because it's some divine right. This is what our education is like. We teach imperialism now.

[LLmao ?✊? 1276]

We teach imperialism, as evidenced by the posts in the thread lol

[Sahaqiel 1232]

My connotation is that we teach that we're in the right, as evidenced by our lack of changing things to actually be right.

[Agent Zako 153]

Yeah, our education system in the U.S. is more than a bit screwed up, but pretending that an imperialist attitude is something exclusive to white eurpoean culture isn't right at all, from a historical perspective at least. People from all over the world have been conquering and influencing their neighbors for millenia. Look at the japanese conquest of southeast Asia in WWII, or the ancient Chinese or Mongolian empires, or the spread of Muslim empires in the middle-east when that religion was new on the block. It's just that in the modern, nuclear age very few countries have the ability to spread their influence through force, or at least very few want to try. I'm not saying an imperialist attitude is right, or that isolationism is wrong, just that it's no secret to anybody who's familiar with the last 100 or so years of world history how the United States became as imperialist as it is today, both militarily and culturally. Complaining about today's empires doesn't do any good. Influence is good if it's making a positive change in others. We should change the empire if we don't like it.

- Again, is there any other nation that tries to push creationism onto the education system?

Well, I'd think a number of theocracies, mostly, but not exclusively, located in the middle east, would have a creationist view taught in public education.

[Sahaqiel 1232]

I guess what I meant by that is is there a nation that doesn't already teach creationism that has its inhabitants pushing for creationism in the curriculum. I find it so weird that there are people are justifying trying to put it in our country's schooling.

 

We just have this completely strange pride in our patriotism, like we're the best nation ever and we don't need to change, but change is how you progress. If we don't change, we will fall behind. That's how it works. So blind patriotism and investing in culture does nothing to help us as a nation. We're so far behind on so many things; education, prison policy, information technology... we're like 17th place in worldwide internet technology, and it's not because we can't make the change. LL, like, pride in culture is just about the staunchest I've ever disagreed with you on. pls adress

[Agent Zako 153]

Ah, I see what you mean about the creationism thing. I don't know off the top of my head if any countries have lawmakers pushing to adopt it.

 

I don't have many strong feelings about patriotism, but I think that pride in one's country is a double-edged sword. Patriotism can be an inspiration for innovation as easily as it can be used to hold countries back. Much like how an artist can be proud of their past work but still feel the urge to improve, or loving a child but still teaching them what's right and wrong. Being proud of something doesn't necessarily mean being completely satisfied with it. But that's semantics I suppose. We should definitely be constantly striving to improve ourselves, our nation, our culture and the world.

[Aethix 129]

Okay, I was educated in private schools, so don't know anything first-hand about the state of affairs in public school, but the different map projections, how they distorted the apparent sizes of countries, and their respective advantages and disadvantages was a pretty big part of elementary school geography for me. The projections that I saw the most for world maps were the Eckert and similar projections. If the people in that video are accurate representations of the products of America's public schools, then if anything it's an argument for the Voucher System.

[Ammonsa 308]

No it isn't, that's a really broad leap to make. I'd think you'd try to improve the public schools before abandoning them to school vouchers.

[LLmao ?✊? 1276]

We just have this completely strange pride in our patriotism, like we're the best nation ever and we don't need to change, but change is how you progress. If we don't change, we will fall behind. That's how it works. So blind patriotism and investing in culture does nothing to help us as a nation. We're so far behind on so many things; education, prison policy, information technology... we're like 17th place in worldwide internet technology, and it's not because we can't make the change. LL, like, pride in culture is just about the staunchest I've ever disagreed with you on. pls adress

 

I am not talking about American culture. I don't know where you got patriotism from. I don't know where you got pride from, either? I am not sure what you think you got out of my words, but I can only reiterate what I meant earlier.

 

I am saying that through "streamlining", or through "progress", you water down culture, or anything really. It's how you effectively kill a culture. That's all I am going to say, really. This thread is a mini-tumblr. 

[Ammonsa 308]

I don't think anyone else here agree with you on that, there's no "culture" in outdated measurement systems or outright falsifying of information. And if you consider it culture, maybe it's better to discard that kind.

[Sahaqiel 1232]

Cultures are not like single organisms though-- changing parts of them does not kill them, it makes them evolve. I would think that saying culture "dies" in response to efforts and desires to change it makes it seem like you hold pride in the culture you have; that you don't want it to change. I wouldn't say our culture is "watered down" because we adopted technology and different kinds of literature, music, and movies. Streamlining doesn't effectively kill a culture. Our entire government was the process of a lot of "streamlining" that eventually made it turn out better than it was before, though we've still got a long way to go. The metric system didn't exist for a long time, but it turned out that some people wanted to streamline our measurement system; we were operating in base 10 for whole numbers and base 12 for fractions, and we had to pick one or the other. We picked base 10 because we have ten fingers, and now we have the metric system, which is by far a more sensible system that is used by most of the world today. That didn't "kill culture", it appended it and truncated the parts that weren't as useful.

 

Letting go of outdated, irrelevant, and inconvenient practices is a sign of growth, not a sign of weakening, both personally and in society at large. I simply can't reason an interpretation of what you've said that I agree with.