Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu.
When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.
LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly".
(Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
Currently you will find that LaTeX is the de facto standard at CERN. Maybe only management would not use it. But CERN gives overleaf professional licence to each member. And all templates I have seen for everything I interacted with that is going into publications are LaTeX.
Well, naturally 20 something years make a difference, although for some others, it looks pretty much the same, as I have visited a few times since then as Alumni.
> For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format
Word still has a closed format. It supposedly standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually documented.
There also used to be the problem of different renderings on different machines (even if you had all the relevant fonts installed): You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. I don't know if that's the case today.
Granted, though, hangs and crashes and weird gibberish on opening a document are rare today.
From the other side of the pond, when your chieftain wonders aloud again why the Europeans don't buy your beef, or your chicken, or now your pork: This here, is the reason.
We like our beef clean, our chickens unchlorinated, and our pigs without heavily experimental GMO modification, thank you very much.
Not because we are anti-science. Because the US has a horrible track record when it comes to how far you can go with caveat emptor.
In fact, in many societies, tattoos are considered a sign of low status, affiliation with lower class (which tends to get harsher sentences) and/or criminal activity, and may - consciously or subconsciously - lead to worse outcomes in trials.[1]
Just tattoo 'cop killer' on your forehead and see if they give you parole.
> kids needed phones because school shooters (which is a dumb argument.)
Considering the US is a country where two dozen cops stay out of a school with an active school shooter until they have run out of bullets ... yeah, it is. No-one wants to hear the local TV station run the dying screams of their children. Better not give them phones so they can call for help (or give the cops information, which would be pointless to begin with).
Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!
Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.
Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium
> It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.
Nah. You are mixing up the skill 'writing glyphs on a piece of paper and retrieving that information via optical means' with 'being well-grounded in a wide array of subjects so you can express an idea in a way that is mentally stimulating to a potential reader'.
Neither takes 12 years to learn. The first, we teach within a year, at most. The second we do not teach at all, and the best 'writers' often are those who were challenged outside of school, by parents who gave them a rich, intellectually interesting environment, not within it.
We most definitely teach number 2. That's what English class is - you read books, plays, maybe documents, and then you write essays on them. You need to be concise, persuasive, have a unique voice.
Just because you, and other's, did not pay attention or were not good writers, does not mean we don't teach that. We do, for years.
On the other hand, we don't teach kids in school the mechanical basics of automated locomotion, how to distill oil into usable fuel and how to mill an engine block before we allow them to get a driver's license.
Unlike modern education, which puts a massive emphasis on teaching how to do menial, useless things before going the sensible route [e.g. I remember vividly how we were tortured by doing table of values calculations in maths for what felt like weeks before we were allowed to use derivatives. I loved maths. Until that point. Then I hated the course (not the subject) with a passion.
Lo and behold, I enter university, and the first thing we do in Mathematics 101 is 'let's forget everything we have learned, we're going to start from the beginning'. Joy.]
I want to stress the point: Smartphones exist (and have existed for 15 years - a more modern 'scary new tech' would probably be LLMs). Banning these things from school will only keep teachers happy because they can keep their teaching methods from the 1890s alive for some more time, instead of using what is available to get kids educated better.
No, it keeps teachers happy because the kids are able to focus on the teaching instead of sneaking looks in their phones every chance they get. (Not all kids, etc, but certainly a lot of kids do this.) No matter what method of teaching you can imagine, a cell phone will be a distraction to a teenager.
What is a criminal but a person who acts against pre-existing regulation anyway?
Bitcoin's 'criminal' use is/was 95% narcotics. In a world without a superficial 'war on drugs', where a state had no right to tell a citizen what to put into their own body, no user, no dealer would be criminal.
If you wish to fight crime, the solution might not be to 'make more things criminal', but to 'make less things criminal'.
On the other hand, I have been using bitcoin for cross-border value transfers where banks would have taken ridiculous fees, and I have used bitcoin for online micro-transactions where setting up other payment systems would have been expensive.
When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.
LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly".
(Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
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