I loved libraries as a kid. They didn’t have computers in them (at least for visitors) until college. The only computers were in designated computer rooms.
In high school, I spent every lunch time in the library, though to be fair I was hanging out with friends there, not reading books. I even played RPGs in the library sometimes.
My first email address I ever had was through my public library. I was sad when it was retired. I used to have to go in the library itself to access it. So weird to think about.
My bold - in the dark ages (1974 or so), part of freshman social studies included a section on writing checks. There we were taught that everything should be printed in capital letters (payee and amount), writing the letters small where they would have been lower-case.
Supposedly made it harder to alter; I still fill out my (very occasional) checks that way.
You know who are still insisting on checks? Some doctors . My mother died under-insured earlier this year. As the inheritor of her quite small estate I was stuck paying off various residual medical bills relating to her final hospital stay. I could rant for a couple of hours about the whole thing. The crazy quilt of billing stretching over multiple months from a dozen different individuals and corporate entities associated with her stay in one ICU room for a few weeks was mind-boggling.
But the weirdest thing was the not one, but two separate physicians working at (but not for) the hospital who required payment via physical checks. No credit cards please, no phone payments. Please dig up an envelope, a stamp and your dusty old check book and send a personal check to these third party billing companies (different ones). In this day and age it felt bizarrely inefficient.
Yes, it’s very rare but some places still can’t take electronic transfers. My youngest daughter’s school is one place. It might be the only entity I’ve written a check for in the past couple of years.
Actually, I kinda doubt it or at the very least they would have made it difficult. As I said they used third-party billing services and it was very strongly implied that for those particular physicians (“Oh, I see checking the files that Dr. So-in-so requires a check payment, I’m afraid I can’t process this one on the phone”) a check of some sort was the only acceptable form of payment.
OMG yes. When he was at Harrison SD #2 (Colorado) it was just this side of military school. He wanted teachers to tell students to sit down, STFU and do the approved worksheets I give you because teachers can’t be trusted to actually develop a curriculum and teach.
Teacher evaluations were an absolute joke made up of whatever random number the evaluator wanted to give you that lesson. (I have an interesting story about one such interaction with my evaluator) In our contract, a first year teacher had to be renewed and if necessary given a PIP unless their evaluation score was a 0. In my year there, EVERY first year teacher in Harrison SD #2 was non-renewed because their scores that ranged from 1 to 4 averaged out to a 0. Not sure how that is possible. And yes … EVERY SINGLE first year teacher in the district had that happen to them. The only reason mine didn’t stay a 0 was I negotiated with the district (remember no union because of Miles) and said since I was leaving the District anyways due to a move that they will NOT non-renew me with a 0 or I will fight them and make it public how they were fudging the average. They agreed and all of my 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s averaged to a 1. But hey I was technically renewed although I had to turn in my resignation letter to make it official.
I think there’s something to this, yes; I use a fountain pen daily, and I find cursive script to be easier than printing. The inkflow in a fountain pen is such that it’s smoother the fewer times the nib is lifted off the paper.
My polling place is the library of a nearby high school. It looks much the same as the library of my high school thirty years ago – more books than computers. From what I can tell while waiting in line, the nonfiction books are less academic, and more “popular” - the sort of works you’d find in the “popular science” or “history” section of a Barnes and Noble.
I was in my twenties when I first discovered that left-handed pen nibs were a thing, by which time I had lost interest in developing any skills in calligraphy (which is what cursive writing amounts to) so, sucks to be me, I guess.
Which we can handle the same way we handle it now when someone needs to read something written in fraktur.
Heck, it’s only in the past decade or so that most American banks have started doing electronic transfers. Before that, what they called “electronic transfers” was just scanning in pieces of paper and printing them out at the other end.
Not really. The guys fighting to preserve slavery are bad guys. The guys fighting to end slavery are good guys.
Doesn’t mean the good guys can’t also be bad guys in another conflict. Grant was a good guy when fighting Confederates, much less so when he sent American troops to wipe out the buffalo in order to starve the Plains Indians.
We can all agree thst ending slavery is good, and preserving it is bad, and which side was doing which in the Civil War.
It’s like the current conflict in the Ukraine. It’s pretty clear, but it’s still war, and these are still humans.
My grandfather used to talk about his grandfather in the Civil War. Slavery wasn’t a factor for that soldier (Union side), at least in what came down to us. I just don’t think ANY five-year period of history involving millions of people is that simple.
That’s completely missing the point. There were many American soldiers in WWII who were fighting for reasons other than “wanting to stop Nazism”, and there were plenty of Wermacht soldiers who personally had nothing to do with the Hollocaust. Doesn’t change who the good guys and bad guys are in that particular conflict.
And the war in Ukraine is not particularly gray either. You have a side invading a sovereign country for no reason, and a side defending themselves from invasion.
. My mother died under-insured earlier this year. As the inheritor of her quite small estate I was stuck paying off various residual medical bills relating to her final hospital stay. I could rant for a couple of hours about the whole thing. The crazy quilt of billing stretching over multiple months from a dozen different individuals and corporate entities associated with her stay in one ICU room for a few weeks was mind-boggling.
Would they have accepted a suitcase full of cash?