74 points

Yes, personal finance is important to teach in school, but teaching this gives young people the ability to keep the sense of wonder they’re born with. It’s the deepest answer to, “When will we ever use this?” for topics that don’t (seem to) have an immediate use. You never know what learning you’ll use in your life.

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11 points

People advocating for teaching of personal finance and taxes in schools were always the ones not paying attention.

I know this because I’ve seen them say that, I’ve also seen them not pay attention when the topic was addressed when they were in high school. Many of these topics are mandatory in Scottish High schools and have been for most millennials and younger.

Anyone that can comprehend the most basic algebra and statistics a secondary education would give you can understand taxes and finance from free accessible websites/library books. Best practices for personal finance and tax laws may change, so your likely to have to learn some of it again. It’s vital schools provide the more abstract but timeless skills of maths, reasoning, reading and comprehension.

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10 points

finance and taxes aren’t taught in American public schools. Finance is a requirement for business college though.

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11 points

They’ll use it when they take a deeper look into something because their curiosity that we fostered was piqued and they discover something new and interesting about our world, adding it to our collective knowledge.

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2 points

And for those who have kids that don’t. That’s fine too. Not everyone is born exceptional or super interested in this kinda shit. That’s fine too. Most of what makes a person themselves is genetic anyway.

Parenting can try to dull or hone those edges to something wicked or calmer if needed though. Even then, brains are different. Don’t be surprised when they are.

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44 points

As an expert in technology all I ever see when I’m walking around places with technology is how fucking terrible it all is. It’s never wonderful.

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7 points

Agreed

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34 points

This reminds me of the time I went camping with my cousin, we picked a campsite that is about halfway for both of us and when we get there and setup this blue jay comes flying by and lands on our table and my cousin and his wife are going crazy, they do bird watching as a hobby and were stoked to see the blue jay.

I felt so odd because we have so many at our place to the point they lay eggs in our bushes and they wake us up with their calls and it’s weird to think that only a few hours away from the campsite where my cousin lives they don’t have any

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12 points

Yeah, my wife’s family lives up in the northern US. We live in the south. The first time they came to visit, her uncle was stoked to see a mockingbird. It was funny to me, because they’re practically everywhere in the south.

He was less stoked when he got attacked by said mockingbird, because it was nesting season and he was too close to the nest.

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22 points

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy, this “elegant and entertaining” (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments “does more than open our eyes…opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world-in fact, many worlds-we’ve been missing” (USA TODAY).

Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary-to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.

Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see-if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real world-where strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe-where, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.


From the author of the #1 New York Times mega-bestseller Inside of a Dog comes an equally smart, delightful, and startling exploration of how we perceive our surroundings. You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In reading these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. The hum of the fluorescent lights; the ambient noise in the room; the feeling of the chair against your legs or back; your tongue touching the roof of your mouth; the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw; the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawnmower; the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision; a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance. Hidden in Plain Sight begins with inattention. It is not meant to help you focus on your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a lecture or during your grandfather’s tales of boyhood misadventures. Rather, it is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived “ordinary.” Horowitz encourages us to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities—taking a walk around the block—we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. So turn off the phone and portable electronics and get into the real world, where you’ll find there are worlds within worlds within worlds.

Snagged it! via library’s free Hoopla (like Libby)

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2 points

Thanks, it does look awesome!

How does hoopla compare to Libby? I’ve no experience with it but it looks like it’s essentially equivalent (as far as books goes, at least)

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21 points

Damn I’m reading that asap

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3 points

Yep same, just placed it on hold at the Library.

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