Scholars aren't supported by sales of their published work, but by teaching/research salaries, much of the money for which comes from the public via government grants.
Musicians by and large aren't supported by record sales, especially in the streaming era, but by concert tickets, merch, etc., or often by other income sources like paid lessons, session work, one-off commissions for specific customers, etc.
Very few fiction authors make a living at it, and most of those who do are barely scraping by.
Journalism is in a very sorry state in the 2020s; its long-time essential income source – classified ads – collapsed a couple decades ago under pressure from free or cheap online substitutes and the industry still hasn't figured out a viable alternative at scale. There has been a 75% drop in local journalists since 2000, most important local news now goes unreported (in many places there is no local reporting whatsoever) and regional/national scale journalism has been increasingly co-opted by the super-wealthy and turned to propaganda. Independent industry leaders with integrity are, over time, replaced by shills and the ethics of industry culture is degenerating.
Big budget TV/movies is probably closest to matching your argument, since these require large-scale coordination by hundreds of people to produce, but here too there are significant complications.
In all of these industries, the people making most of the profit are businesspeople rather than creators, though a trivial number of celebrity creators make good money.
Much of the published culture you mention is done entirely as a hobby, and our current copyright regime actually stands in the way of creation as much as supports it.
One thing to keep in mind is that many (most?) of the books and papers in these archives are decades old, usually no longer in print, make zero or vanishingly small amounts of money for their original creators, are sometimes only physically available from distant libraries that are challenging to access, etc.
In doing scholarly research, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly search and skim hundreds of vaguely relevant sources, but simply wouldn't be worth the trouble to pay for or track down a "legitimate" copy of every one, and in many cases would be physically impossible. These "pirate" archives make doing real library research, previously limited to scholars at top-tier universities, accessible to orders of magnitude more people.
There really isn't that much profit in most of these works, and whether a scholar reads one on their laptop screen vs. in a physical book in a university library somewhere doesn't have any material impact on the original authors, editor, illustrator, translator, printer, etc.
That sounds plausible. Most of the features are kind of gimmicky bolt-ons added piecemeal and not really integrated with each-other. They make for cool 10-second demos but then most users ignore them because they aren't part of a coherent system. The result is a menu after menu of gimmicks, like a cabinet of hyper-specialized kitchen tools bought from infomercials. There has been limited product vision about the core abstractions and their basic composability. If you give a skilled user a photoshop version from the early 2000s they'll largely be able to do what they need, because there hasn't really been much fundamental innovative improvement in the past ~25 years.
Microsoft actually does a fairly good job with this. Here's a part of a talk that goes over a single feature in PowerPoint (a slide animation that morphs the contents of one slide into a different slide) and demonstrates how this feature interacts with the enormous existing PowerPoint feature set in interesting ways. https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc?t=1409 It's obviously a stupid gimmicky feature but whatever team Microsoft put on it were clearly overachievers.
Thanks for sharing that fascinating video! It seems like a fair bit of work went into it. One criticism I have is that it is undiscoverable and opaque; it is not obvious how it is going to behave. I wonder how many users are aware of it.
Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
NEET means "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The stereotype is an unemployed young adult living with their parents and playing video games all day.
They had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school.
All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules.
Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.
Huh. I have only good memories of this calculator. Would buy for my kids in a heartbeat. The fact that it barely changed is a feature to me. I know exactly what they’d be getting.
The scam doesn’t just work in the US. In The Netherlands most secondary school students had, and I think still have, to buy these. I imagine in other countries too.
There is an interesting side effect from having always used TI calculators. They use a dot as the decimal separator, not a comma like we do here.
There is usually some option to switch, but the hardware button obviously stays the same, so I’ve always been taught to just make that switch in my head, and it has become the natural thing for me to do.
I see 1,000.50 on a screen I write down 1.000,50.
When I use software that uses a comma as the decimal separator, I get annoyed and it takes some mental effort to enter the right values.
… that continues no matter what. I gave my kid my 89 from the late 90s—I was happy to avoid the TI student tax. Then a year or two back, the college board banned the 89 from certain tests/classes and so I had to cough up for an 84. Even if you take care of your stuff, treat it well to pass on to your kids, the Man finds a way to extract their cut.
Plenty of students succeed just fine without owning a graphing calculator (they can spend a few minutes learning the handful of test-relevant features and borrow one for the exam). Thankfully as of this year there is also a Desmos option.
I think you can flash a TI83 Plus ROM to a TI73 by using an exploit? One exploit was that flashing an OS writes all the ROM, then checks the signature afterwards, then erases it if it fails. Pull batteries at the correct time and...
This is slightly misleading advice. The ideal place for the display has the top of the display at roughly eye level, or for a very large display maybe slightly above, which puts most of the display below eye level. Humans actually have great ability to look slightly downward for long periods of time while doing stuff with their hands, even while keeping their head held up straight, and indeed our eyes can more comfortably focus on close objects in the lower part of our field of view than straight ahead. What you don't want to do is slouch or bend your neck too much.
A laptop display attached to the keyboard usually isn't an ideal placement, but it's generally not too bad.
Welcome to "tech neck" - upper crossed syndrome, from looking slightly down.
You're inviting some surprising symptoms, not just neck and back pain, but things like numbness, tingling, or pain shooting down your arms. Really not fun.
Key posture correction seems to be pulling head back. Some physical therapy exercises can help as well.
Having the desk low, the chair high, or putting a laptop on your lap is okay. Having the desk or table "high" (i.e. at normal height for writing with a pen or eating a meal) is generally worse but not an insurmountable problem.
In either case, the most important thing is to keep your wrists in as straight and neutral position as possible, with your palms and wrists "floating" rather than resting on anything while actively typing. Having the wrists either flexed downward or extended upward is a really bad idea. Having the wrists turned out to the side isn't great either, but not as bad.
The keyboard should be positioned close enough to your body so that your shoulders can be relaxed with your upper arms hanging loosely. The laptop surface should be roughly parallel to your forearms, so if you have a high desk or table relative to your torso you will need to prop up the far side to tilt it up a bit.
If your wrist is in contact with the edge of the laptop while you are actively typing, then your typing style has a good chance of giving you RSI. You'd be better off trying to fix that than trying to make the fast path to RSI more convenient.
How the f are you supposed to type? Ideally I'd like full support for my arms from the elbow to the wrist.
In my first job - i think it was in 1997, I had my own small room with an L-shaped desk with a rounded corner. That gave a few inches of space for resting my arms - both when typing on a quite reasonable Pentium laptop, and especially when using the mouse.
Since then, the desks and the chairs has become shittier and shittier. Except perhaps when a was a consultant for an HR-department.
The U-shaped desk was probably the best ergonomically designed workplace I've had. Maybe a wheat-filled pad along the desk would have made it better.
If your arms are resting, then your fingers and wrists are doing the maximum amount of reaching as you type. If you use a wrist rest you are encouraging your fingers/wrist to reach up (bend in your wrist) instead of neutral or reaching down (more natural position).
Constant change in position, dynamic motion, strong & brief muscular exertion of whole hand and arm, even including the shoulder vs constant static position w/ small repetitive motions, where the fingers really are doing almost all the work.
You should try to avoid continuous static load on your muscles, especially the smaller ones. So you should find a typing position where that doesn't happen. You also want to use your muscles in the strong and comfortable part of their range of motion, which depends on the entire chain of joints, because tendons have to stretch past several joints to get to whatever bone they attach to – so for fluent finger motions, you want to keep wrists and hands in as neutral a position as you can.
If your wrists are not straight while typing a lot, that's really bad. I constantly see people typing with their wrists either significantly flexed or significantly extended; doing that a lot is a fast road to RSI, and even doing it a little is pretty unpleasant and inadvisable.
If you are going to type a whole lot at a stretch (say, as a programmer or writer), you want your arms to be mostly passively supported from the shoulder. Having your arm bent at the elbow doesn't cause much strain, as long as the upper arm is hanging loosely down with your shoulder relaxed – so bring the keyboard relatively close to your torso. Resting your wrists, palms, or forearms on some surface and then typing generally causes more strain than having your wrists and palms "floating" above the keyboard while actively typing. You can rest the fingertips lightly on the key tops if you want. You can rest your palms on a palmrest or arms on an armrest (or table, or lap, or whatever) while you are taking a break from typing. It's generally a good idea to take regular breaks.
There doesn't appear to be good evidence that this is better for RSI. I found one study that shows greater shoulder and back strain when doing the hover hands approach. It might make more sense for piano since you need more mobility up and down the keyboard, but for typing your hands don't need to move nearly as much, so resting should be just fine. The do suggest some sort of support under your wrists, though.
Huh, seriously? Have you ever worked in an office? Perhaps your mental picture of what op is describing might be misaligned? I just always assumed it was a rarer/ more disciplined style some people had
On a modern laptop, the keyboard is on the top half of the lower case these days, not the bottom.
My palms are hovering over or resting on the chassis, and I sit high enough that my wrists do not come in contact with the edge of the case or desk. The majority of the weight of my arms is supported by my shoulders. For me, the ideal height happens to be pretty close to a neutral wrist position.
A more concrete way of putting it is if you are putting so much weight on your wrists that the edge of the MacBook is making you uncomfortable, you're probably doing it wrong.
I've heard this but I've personally been typing this way for 25+ years (wrists on the rest, including on laptops exclusively for the last 15) and my wrists are fine. Meanwhile people I know with ergonomic keyboards and everything that's supposed to save your wrists are the ones with bad wrists.
The reasonable takeaway from that correlation is that people with preexisting issues turn to ergonomic keyboards to avoid worsening those issues, not the other way round.
While this is true, if standard keyboards were bad then everyone who uses them would have issues, yet many (most?) don't.
Sometimes I think it comes down to actual typing technique. For example. I've heard of "Emacs pinky" which is easily avoided by simply using the Ctrl key opposite the key being pressed (use right Ctrl for C-c for example). I religiously never use Ctrl, Shift or Alt + another key with the same hand and I feel that's been huge. Also my elbow, wrist and hand always form a straight line to the keyboard with a standard laptop keyboard and the right body position/desk and chair adjustment.
After RSI years ago, I switched to an X220 and had 100% the opposite experience. The curve at the front of the case was a perfect resting point for the heel of my (average size) hand to allow easy reach of the keys. I replicated this geometry by sanding a pine 1x4 and wrapping that in soft leather for a wrist rest with a procession of mechanical keyboards (currently a Lenco Majestouch 2). Literally decades later, all is well.
Magnus "drives meaningful outcomes" because he's really good at chess and members of the public enjoy watching him play, so various chess-related businesses will pay him money for sponsorship. How do you propose to "not allow him" that influence? Ban all use of people's names in marketing and products?
My commentary goes above and beyond just Magnus. Re: Magnus. Sponsorships are fine. Him making money is fine. He shouldn't be able to dictate the rules of the game or the platforms by which it is played. IMO.
He's not the first person to be "really good at chess".
It's a broad statement meant to mean "celebrities have too big of a platform and too much influence over the average joe".
Magnus doesn't "dictate the rules of the game or the platforms by which it is played", so I'm not sure what your point is.
You think Magnus should be forced to participate in chess events he doesn't enjoy / doesn't like the format of? Or you think organizations like FIDE or chess.com should be blocked from trying to entice Magnus to participate in their events?
Musicians by and large aren't supported by record sales, especially in the streaming era, but by concert tickets, merch, etc., or often by other income sources like paid lessons, session work, one-off commissions for specific customers, etc.
Very few fiction authors make a living at it, and most of those who do are barely scraping by.
Journalism is in a very sorry state in the 2020s; its long-time essential income source – classified ads – collapsed a couple decades ago under pressure from free or cheap online substitutes and the industry still hasn't figured out a viable alternative at scale. There has been a 75% drop in local journalists since 2000, most important local news now goes unreported (in many places there is no local reporting whatsoever) and regional/national scale journalism has been increasingly co-opted by the super-wealthy and turned to propaganda. Independent industry leaders with integrity are, over time, replaced by shills and the ethics of industry culture is degenerating.
Big budget TV/movies is probably closest to matching your argument, since these require large-scale coordination by hundreds of people to produce, but here too there are significant complications.
In all of these industries, the people making most of the profit are businesspeople rather than creators, though a trivial number of celebrity creators make good money.
Much of the published culture you mention is done entirely as a hobby, and our current copyright regime actually stands in the way of creation as much as supports it.
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