I never understood how the knowledge of the capitals of states or countries is useful in any way. It's meaningless. It can be easily looked up, if you need that information. I can't even imagine a practical scenario when one would need to know it.
It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it.
As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".
To which he answer "the capital of France" and everyone keep going.
If I tell you that you need to go to Sucre for a meeting, do you know where that is? Probably not. You will google it, spend 5 seconds on the internet and boom, you know where it is. Putting countless hours to learn all of them is useless. This is time that could be spent learning things that are important in the modern world. The computers aren't going away. You will never have to search for the name of a town in a dictionary or encyclopedia for hours anymore. It's a 5 seconds tasks.
According to the author of SuperMemo, the lifetime cost of learning a particular fact for life, in a perfectly structured spaced repetition system, is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes[1]. Thus, you should never memorize a fact that will come up so rarely and is trivial enough to look up that it doesn't exceed that lifetime threshold. The vast majority of state and national capitals fall into the "not worth it" category.
Also, most students don't have nearly the efficiency of learning that a spaced repetition system affords (Especially Wozniak's highly optimized system wherein he has a database that he habitually has quizzed daily for years), so for them the cost is dramatically higher.
> lifetime minimum cost of remembering a single well-formulated piece of knowledge can easily be estimated to fall into the range from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (minimum cost is the cost that is achieved using the optimally spaced repetition schedule). This estimation can be used in cost-benefit analysis in deciding which mission-critical pieces of knowledge should be subject to learning based on spaced repetition
While everyone thinks "What an idiot."
While you are 100% right that you dont NEED to know that Paris is the capital of France, displaying that ignorance for all to see is just bad form.
While your analogy makes sense (bolivian capital no one knows about), knowing that Paris is the capital of France is incidental knowledge when you spend any time looking at western history for the last several hundred years.
The fact that you remember that Paris is the capital of France has nothing to do with what you learnt during high school. You know it, because it is general knowledge. You saw it in the movies. You had a phone call from someone living there. Only someone living in a cave would not know where or what Paris is, hence why you would call him an idiot.
However, the capital of an area that isn't in the media very of ten? You won't remember them. "Quick, what is the capital of Cambodia? No idea? You surely must be an idiot! Let's fire you!" Nobody will ever say that. If I tell someone that they must go to Ankara for a meeting, I would pretty much expect them to answer with "where?"
Having general knowledge is important. Knowing the main capitals of the world is important too. Spending hours and hours to learn all of the obscure ones and commit it to memory in a world where you can say "Ok Glasses, Ankara is the capital of which country?" is useless.
That is a cultural problem, and one that is going away. Trivia used to dominate what people thought of as intelligence, but since it is so utterly useless in the era of online search, that particular brand of intelligence is a complete waste.
People who have absurd volumes of trivia in their heads seem like less intelligent these days (at least to me) simply because it means they are not smart enough to allocate their learning time to things that are actually valuable.
Without looking it up, I would guess a city named after Juan Mariscal Sucre (or is it the other way around?) must be in either Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia. I would probably guess Ecuador on a hunch but that's probably wrong as their former currency was the Sucre and it would be funny to have a city named the same.
> It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it.
True.
> As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".
That's actually what I would ask if my boss wanted to send me to a conference in "Paris" without any further information (presuming that there wasn't additional context to disambiguate the reference), since there's like a dozen cities with that name in the US, some in Canada, one in Kirabati, and, oh, yeah, a big one in France.
Yes, by the time you are an adult, you're expected to have some rudimentary understanding of geography and the arbitrary names humans assigned to places. I have a hard time imagining that someone would not know where Paris is by the time he reaches adult age. Not all learning is done at schools, you know.
Here's the thing: we have such things as maps. There are still occasions today (I'm almost 33) in which I am unsure where's a particular location. So I look it up. Next time it comes up, I won't have to.
I do not know the name of the capitals of most African countries. There are some small countries which I have probably forgotten about. But, if in doubt, I can research the damn things.
That's different from memorizing the multiplication tables.
1) What does this have to do with knowing Paris is a capital?
2) What's the big deal? I'm sure most people don't know the capital of Mongolia or Canada or Switzerland or Slovenia or Croatia. And these aren't even African countries.
3) What's the practical limitation here? Are you unable to travel to cities that you didn't know the names of 10 minutes before you found them on Google maps?
If you think the only purpose of knowing the names of world cities is finding them in maps to travel there, you will be utterly incompetent at basic comprehension of 1) history, 2) real (not theoretical) economics, 3) sociology, 4) reading the International section of a newspaper.
Forming an understanding of those topics requires connecting the dots between various stories you read about them at different places, and for that it's essential to know at least the vague relative positions of regions where their major cities reside.
Surely it would be better to learn history, economics, sociology and to read the international section of a newspaper than to memorise cities? Knowledge of capitals and so forth is incidentally acquired by doing those other things.
Why are the capitals so important? Maybe I want to travel to Kyoto or Makati instead of Tokyo or Manila. I can see the value in knowing the countries and a little about them, but capitals aren't the entirety of a country, and knowing about them won't tell you much about the country as a whole.
I can learn about the capitals if I ever plan to go there.
Is Washington DC more important than NYC or any city in Silicon Valley? I'm not convinced that capitals are the most important city.
You can talk about the culture, economy, and history of a country without ever talking about the capital. Capitals are usually (not always) where the government sits, but that's only a small part of what you can learn about a country.
It surely has a lot of influence on economy, history (culture is a different thing in a country-continent like the USA, but most countries are the size of a state, not the Union). Is * important to understand the state of *?
Texas City^H^H Austin of Texas
Los Angeles^H^H Sacramento of California
Anchorage^H^H Juneau of Alaska
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Edited to fix the initial bad example.
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Screw it, USA states have their capitals assigned to the weirdest cities instead of the largest ones. No wonder that you don't understand why capitals are important to normal countries.
We definitely have an odd way of assigning importance to subdivisions of land. I live in an area where one of the "cities" is a mansion rented out for events with a few businesses and homes built to support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl,_Georgia
I think it helps to get a sense of the world - though browsing through an atlas, and getting broader lessons is much better than just memorizing state/country capitals.
I loved browsing atlases as a kid, and ended up visiting close to a third of the countries in the world (ok, so I cheated and went to Europe :P ), so YMMV.
PD: I still want to see the remaining two-thirds of the world :)
(S)he didn't say it was. (S)he said "near vacuum." And that comes straight from the hyperloop paper:
"Just as aircraft climb to high altitudes to travel through less dense air, Hyperloop encloses the capsules in a reduced pressure tube. The pressure of air in Hyperloop is about 1/6 the pressure of the atmosphere on Mars. This is an operating pressure of 100 Pascals, which reduces the drag force of the air by 1,000 times relative to sea level conditions and would be equivalent to flying above 150,000 feet altitude."
There's no such thing as a "full vacuum". 100 Pascals is 0.1% of atmospheric pressure at sea level. It's pretty frickin' close to a "full vacuum". If there's a leak anywhere in the tube you're boned.
By full vacuum I was referring to the conditions you have in space. And no - when you have even a slight allowance for a margin of 'error' or leakage - that's all you need to balance things out. And if the leakage is higher, it's a matter of efficiencies reducing - not complete failure.
1-3 are already figured out, they are not hard problems or very different than the existing proposed HSR line. 4 is addressed and the only part that you can't really know until you dive into actual implementation. It is estimated though.
I take it you mean to imply that by "figured out" I mean we have a working example. Obviously not, or we wouldn't be lacking a hyperloop. By figured out I mean all the requisite problems have been solved. It isn't a mystery how we could build a tube and put vacuum pumps on it. And we've built plenty of complex structures in seismic areas.
How often do you need to scan a 3D model of anything?
I'm sure it will be popular with the creative people. It's possible it will get popular in some niche markets, like real estate agents taking 3D shots of the apartments they offer (though not much hope here, they still fail to take decent photos even now).
How often do you need one of those auto-ma-whatsits anyway? They're really only good for a few blocks of downtown where the streets are flat cobblestone. They're useless on most trails. Just get a higher resolution horse and be happy with it.
If you want to buy, say furniture, a big barrier of web shopping is that you cannot automatically reason about their dimensions, because they are not exact enough (and even more seriously, they are usually available only as free text).
The 3D scanning technology would enable products that are add-ons to objects where the original manufacturer did not see value in adding an interface. If I can scan my car interior, I can attach my GPS to nearly any surface "perfectly". This gives aftermarket products very nice finish with a much lower cost.
You can even imagine previewing the furniture "live" in your apartment. I've been thinking about this for a while and Ikea made the first step with their 2014 catalogue. Ikea's version is pretty limited though, but that's a first step.
How often do you need to take panoramic pictures? Not that often, but it's fun and gimmicky enough that it's on the iPhone.
If (when) we can make a cheap and small sensor that can provide depth data to the camera to make cool looking 3D pictures, it'll likely find its way on smartphone cameras.
In 2050, will our pictures still be 2D arrays of RGB pixels?
Perhaps more to the point, how often do you "need" to take pictures at all? Smartphone cameras have proliferated even though most people don't "need" to be able to take pictures of their food or whatever.
Getting a minimum wage job would instantly up your budget from $31.50/week to $320/week ($282.75 take home after taxes), and even more if you're willing to work more than 40 hours.
If you are incapable of getting a minimum wage job, you are either lazy or disabled or mentally ill. Heck, I know disabled people working for much more than minimum wage.
"If you are incapable of getting a minimum wage job, you are either lazy or disabled or mentally ill."
I hate to say [[citation needed]], but I really think that if you're going to make an absolute statement which completely dismisses a massive source of suffering, you need to prove it in some convincing way.
"I know disabled people working for much more than minimum wage."
...and therefore all people, disabled or not, can find minimum-wage work?
I just looked up op craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs, such as delivery, servers, greeters, waiters, busboys, hosts, runners, coat checkers, etc.
If you have any skills, there are even more options.
I just looked up on craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs, such as delivery, servers, greeters, waiters, busboys, hosts, runners, coat checkers, etc.
If you have any skills, there are even more options.
If these jobs are always available, that's exactly what it means.
If your talking points were true, there would be no job postings in such numbers.
In fact, there's a shortage of unskilled labor, particularly in farming, where they need harvesters, pickers, pruners, packers and can't find nearly enough.
Think about $300K jobs - there definitely aren't enough for everyone, but they do exist. Do you see many 300K job postings? Nope, they get taken so fast, there's no need to post them.
It's a stone cold certainty that companies actually spend longer filling $300k vacancies (careful selection and vetting from a defined list of suitable people) than unskilled labour (advertise, hire first adequate candidate(s), don't take ads down). A shortage of suitable candidates is one of the main reasons why the $300k jobs are $300k, after all. Sure, the supply of minimum wage jobs is vast, but it also tends to be lower than the demand for them, hence paying minimum wage.
I don't think a two week farm job at harvest time is much use to the average member of the urban poor
@notahacker: You know the difference between me and you? I provided citations, and you provided your opinion.
Here, a Bereau of Labor Statistics estimates we will need 3 million more unskilled laborers (jobs that do not require a high school degree) this decade.
I think it is simply an article written by someone with a sufficiently different set of cultural values that a great deal of additional background information would be needed for it to be understandable.
If you're a banking intern, it means you're a college kid. If you're in NYC, you can do something like live in NYU student housing for the summer. It's no big deal.
As an analyst, you'll be making over six figures, with a base in the $70-$80k range. You can live 20 minutes from midtown Manhattan on that, though you'll probably have to have roommates (but hey you're 22 so again, no big deal).
You know, if your base is $80k, and you're regularly working 100 hour weeks, your hourly wage rapidly approaches $16 / hour ... which is about what the fast food workers are currently striking for.
I do not think I could be coerced to work 100 hours a week regularly for less than $50/hour of cash and equity, and the lower bound might be closer to $100/hour.
You're not working 100 hour weeks consistently over the year. I'd be surprised if the yearly average is over 75 (in IB; I'd be surprised if it were over 60 in trading). Moreover, you don't take the job for the first-year salary. You take it for the potential of making $500k+ before 30 (if you stick it out), or going the MBA route and getting a cushy $200k 9-6 at some F500 afterward.
What is the success rate like? Do 100% of IB starters make it? 1%? 10%?
If you've got decent odds of hitting the big payoff, that's one thing, but if the expected value is low, it just becomes another lottery, with a few winners, a lot of losers, and a the winners enriching themselves at the expense of the losers.
Putting up with banking hours is all about the pay-off 7-10 years down the road.
If you can put up with the hours until you end up as a director or higher, you can pretty reliably makes over a million dollars per year (with continuous increases in salary) putting only 50-60 hrs a week.
People do banking because it's one of the lowest risk ways to becoming rich.
I worked as a technology intern at a large investment bank for one summer, and my salary was a prorated 80k. The IB kids were making about the same (although they worked many, many more hours than we did). This was 2 years ago.
N.B.: This was awful and I am now safely far, far away from the banking industry.
