Americans need to know how the stock and bond markets work, at least at some functional level. Unless you believe an employer-sponsored pension plan + social security will cover 100% of your expenses in retirement (and this is a super rare situation unless you’re a well paid government employee or someone who is lucky enough to have a high paying job in one of the few private companies that still operate pensions) then that means you’re most likely making contributions to a 401k or an individual IRA account.
For most middle class Americans these investment vehicles are supposed to be how you’re going to pay for your retirement. Yet many Americans make some paltry contribution to their workplace savings plan and never even properly allocate their balances, some even just let all of it accrue in company stock even when they could change their investment elections or rebalance them. These same people who get to age 55-60 and start thinking about retirement, and are hit by a sudden market downturn will wish dearly they know about equities vs bonds and how your asset allocation at that age needs to be different than it was at 25.
I think 401ks and such are mostly a failed experiment, people have shown they cannot handle them. Either they are improperly diversified, lack the discipline to contribute the amounts they need throughout their career, or think nothing of taking loans out or even big withdrawals and paying the penalty whenever it suits them.
People I’ve worked with occasionally found VLOOKUP confusing, and sometimes any function beyond SUM and arithmetic. VLOOKUP allows you to skip a lot of manual searching, provided your list has a decent identifier, which can often be a combination of two different columns.
OFFSET and MATCH have handy uses of their own, but can be combined to look up data not only to the right of the identifier column, which is a limitation of VLOOKUP, but lets you look at different column and row combinations-- ranges-- based on variables.
The other day I had beige trousers on and then I put on a medium gray sweater, looked in the mirror and said to myself “why does this look so bad?” Oh, yeah, its because I now look like a piece of naval lint!
I work with engineers, and am amazed at how so few of them have heard of the Student’s t-distribution. I have to explain to them that they should be using it when they have small sample sizes.
Also, it would seem quite a few researchers have never heard of the Null Hypothesis.
Yes, the knowledge came in handy for them, in a specific circumstance. However, in my 54 years on this planet, I’ve never NEEDED to know about atlatls, other than reading about them in one of Jean Auel’s books.
If you have trouble opening a jar, the trick is to break the seal, not to strain yourself trying to twist ever harder. You can buy a special tool for this (the most popular brand name is JarKey), but a knife will do the trick just fine, too.
In US measurements, four tablespoons is exactly the same as a quarter cup. (And if you’re converting American recipes to metric, a quarter cup of butter is very close to 50g. But I suspect this tip has a more limited audience.)
If you scald milk by accident, you can clean the pan by gently heating water with a tiny bit of dish soap in the pan, while you scrape the bottom with a metal spoon or spatula. Of course, if you scald the milk in a non-stick or cast iron pan, you’ve got a problem…
What the ‘on/off’ symbol on computers and almost every other electrical device looks like.
How to get out of a rip (ocean, river, whatever).
How to float (it’s really not that hard…)
How to read.
How to pay attention to your surroundings. I know this one sounds obvious, but I work in a department store that has a fitting room, and the sheer number of people who walk straight in, ignoring me at my counter (why is there a counter, or an attendant, if you aren’t supposed to stop? Is the company really going to pay me when they don’t need me?) and walk down the wrong corridor.
There are signs, saying the way for womens and the way for mens, but they always go the wrong way. It drives me absolutely mad. I nearly hit a woman once.
How do these people cross a road without being flattened by a car? They obviously don’t look where they’re going. Basic common sense, people. Please.
