The page I linked is as much as I know about it.
[since late 2020] only about 80 out of 14,000 types of official government documents require an inkan seal to be official
Although it doesn’t say what the government replaced it with.
The number of companies switching to electronic signatures, such as Docusign and Cloudsign, has been on a steady increase in the past years.
That was from a character in one of his books. Heinlein put a lot of such proclamations in his characters’ mouths to give himself the literary distance to do a little bullshitting. In Friday he suggested people should only be able to vote if they could solve a quadratic equation. In Starship Troopers he went so far as to say only people who had performed federal service should be allowed to vote. He was really, really invested in the idea that only people who had proved themselves should be allowed to vote. Not a bad sentiment really, but problematic in many ways.
As far as skills a human ought to have, he laid out his case against specialization a bit more elaborately:
I take it as a noble and worthy encouragement for us all to be generally useful and not to overspecialize, but obviously some of this is kind of dumb if taken literally. No, I don’t need to know how to butcher a hog or plan an invasion. I’m not trying to bootstrap some sort of remote colony, I live in a modern society with a modern economy where we have people who are trained to do those specialized tasks, much more efficiently and effectively than I ever could.
The glory of society is the way specialization allows us to excel and achieve more. And while I can get fully behind the idea that education, and particularly math education, is necessary for a functioning democratic society, the idea that people should be able to do a math problem to vote is too close to the voter-suppressing literacy tests of days gone by.
Heinlein is a fun author and generally a good guy when judged by the standard of his times, but he’s not to be taken seriously as a philosopher.
Yep! i have just never had a need for it. Granted, many of my field activities weren’t delving into polynomials, but even now, I can hand crank out what I need to find without it.
Tripler
Oh man, but get me started with a slide rule, I’m in heaven (especially around some of my nerdy coworkers!!)
When I took driver’s ed in high school, we had to learn how to do hand signals. This was a method of indicating to other drivers that you were about to turn or stop. You would roll down your window (they didn’t have electronic window openers back then) and stick your left arm out of the car. You would point your arm straight out to indicate a left turn, up to indicate a right turn, or down to indicate you were stopping.
I never used this “skill” outside of driver’s ed. Every car I’ve driven has had turn signals and brake lights. If I did indicate I was planning on making a turn by sticking my arm out the window, I doubt most drivers would even understand what I meant.
That said, I think motorcyclists still use hand signals. But I don’t drive a motorcycle.
I do drive a motorcycle, and I’ve never used a hand signal while riding one. Bicycles yes, motorcycles no.
RE: converting metric to standard (or what is sometimes called Imperial)
The really useless thing was that this was done not because we were going to live in a future where we needed to do this every day. We were 8, and by the time we were 21, supposedly the US was going to be wholly metric.
The idea was that this would help us conceptualize the metric system. But all it did was make us think is was very difficult and time-consuming.
I do hand-signal turns on my bike, but half the time, if there’s anyone there to see, they seem to think I’m waving.
Bigfoot: Nobody can predict a year or two hence, but right now Nixon has the combination to the safe and he’s throwing fistfuls of greenbacks at anything that even looks like local law enforcement. Federal funding beyond the highest number you can think of, which for most hippies is not much further than the number of ounces in a kilo.
Doc: Thirty-five… point… something, everybody knows that…
I still occasionally see arm signals on the road. I had to use them a few years ago when my turn signal bulb burned out. And back in the '70s I had a POS car whose turn signal lever was broken for several months until I could afford to get it fixed.
Eta: if you didn’t learn arm signals, how would you as a car driver know what other users of the road (bicyclists) were signaling?
Definitely not the same, although most of the names and quantities are the same or almost the same; for the topic of this thread it would have been amusing if anyone were being taught the skill of converting between U.S. gallons and Imperial gallons, or U.S. survey inches and Imperial inches…
(Trivia: The difference between a survey foot and a standard foot is microscopic, about 1 part in 500,000, or 1/8 inch per mile, per Google’s AI overview. We can now return to our regular forum topic.)
When I was a young lad, aged eight, the whole class had to learn to sew, basic stitching to make a very simple stuffed animal. In this case, it was a duck.
There was great outcry amongst the unwashed youth (the boys) because sewing “is for girls!”.
Our teacher, a lovely lady, shut us all up, by saying, “If you don’t learn to sew, when you grow up you will have to marry… a GIRL!”
Queue all the little boys sewing blanket stich and stiching on buttons with great dedication…
I did gow up and marry a girl, but I never sewed again. I can remember the technique to blanket stich though.
(I don’t actually think this is a useless skill, just one I don’t use. I’m more of a duct tape/cable ties type of clothing repairman)
I can do a little, like a button, altho my wife laughs at my “skills”.
So the question would be, how good was her Russian?
I would not have been surprised if it was decent, but that would not have helped me at the time, my Russian being no better than my German, at the time…
[Russian-language classes were certainly obligatory in the GDR]
Do we have to? 
More Trivia: the Survey (American) foot is officially depreciated, since 2022, and the International (Anglo/American) foot should be used for Survey — unless you are still tied to the old reference grid, which some mapping is.
The international foot was introduced in 1959, because during WWII increased interaction between American and British manufacture lead to a desire to use a common measure. The Americans and British also agreed on a new thread pitch and thread profile.
The British were already on an international standard, an “Imperial” standard, and had been for a while – it’s a major reason why the British didn’t adopt Metric – unlike continental Europeans, the British already had a rationalised national and international measurement system.
But after agreeing (1959) with the Americans on details of the standards that needed updating or re-doing, around 1965 the British decided that trade with Continental Europe was more important than competition with Continental Europe, and ditched the standards they had just negotiated.
I think it’s probable that if the UK had gone metric post-war, American would have been part of that standardisation effort, and would have gone with metric threads instead of Anglo/American threads.
I don’t think bicyclists here use the left/right/stop signals. They just put out a hand in the direction they want to go. You can do that on a bicycle. It’s been dropped from driver-ed here.
As a cyclist, I find that making the hand signals with very abrupt, rigid gestures seems to work better to get the point across to drivers.
Lift the left hand and SNAP that forearm down and out to the left with pointing forefinger! Bring up the left elbow and SWING the hand up above the head with thumb pointing right! Etc.
Doing the manual equivalent of a directional blinker (left forefinger pointing left, or left thumb pointing right, continually curls back into the fist and re-points) seems to help too.
But yeah, a cyclist just sort of casually putting a hand out or up or down does not seem to register with drivers as a vehicular-traffic signal.
Huh, interesting. But it looks like the survey foot will soon be a thing of the past.
“soon” is three years ago