Ha ha you’re just french

You got a point ;)

So what to do?

A good starting point would be to admit that we made wrong choices. And that includes the (too) many reforms in the public education system.

What’s the purpose of public education? Answering that question should not require thousand pages of gibberish text.

It doesn’t matter one’s personal beliefs, values, political stances when seeing their kid barely being able to read and write, let alone have some grammar and vocabulary. This should worry any parent to their chore.

Why? Because it’s their own kid that is being screwed by not getting a proper education. Alas, so many parents themselves simply don’t give a crap about reading. Why would they worry about their kid not reading?

There is no nuanced thought possible without a rich enough vocabulary to put those thoughts into words. There is also no articulated discussion possible when there is no grammar to translate said thoughts and ideas into meaningful sentences. And in such a simplified world everything will either be black or white, good or bad. Unsurprisingly, exactly like what our society is turning itself into. A gigantic cacophony of ‘us’ vs ‘them’, ‘good’ vs ‘evil’. And I doubt this will end well.

And that’s a sad thing happening in France too.

I mention reading and writing because it’s my main point of interest but it’s as true for math as it is for sciences, as for any other matter that requires efforts and doesn’t give immediate rewards. All of them have been/are being reduced to nothingness in the name of not ‘asking too much from the kids’. Like if learning those (admittedly difficult) matters served no purpose and turning public school into the opposite of what a public school is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, many schools for richer kids are more than ever focusing on making them learn more of those demanding matters, with the blessing of their parents.

So, which kids do you think will end-up getting the best positions? Who do you think will end up being the next decision and policy makers? The next innovators or ‘disruptors’? And who will the the ones deciding what part of public money should be invested into… public education? Yeah, that doesn’t bode well.

Information is hard to get by too, it is either click bait or filtered through the wants and needs of the ultra rich. Any tips warmly welcomed!

Yes, it’s hard to get by and it also has a cost but quality info is still available. Even better, if it still requires time and… curating, it’s can also be free.

That’s the reason why public school should matter a lot more (teaching kids and probably their parents too how to access said info, which is not through TV, or YT, or social media).

As should matter public libraries because next to books, any public library here in France will have a decent selection of newspapers and magazines for adults as well as for younger audiences even though I’m more akin to encourage kids read ‘adult’ contents (I fell in love with reading at a young age reading Ovid and then Homer). Newspapers/mags in public libraries are free for anyone to read but they’re also kinda hard to get into because there is no simplified or ‘guided’ entrance.

Hence the importance to teach kids how to read (and how to properly use a book or a newspaper). It also helps a lot to have adults around then able to show them what to do, what to look for and how to use it.

Disclaimer: I will admit I’m an old moron (‘un vieux con’, we would say in French) that doesn’t understand jack shit to the actual world and to the many issues younger generations are facing.

And yet another rant… not sorry :p

Did not know about that. I’m one of their customers.

Did not need to switch as I’ve been using my own domain names (French registrar with French and/or German hostings) since I created my first website… back when quite a few of you reading this today were not even born yet. No, that does not mean I’m that old. Absolutely not :p

I also have a proton and a tuta account (and @ mailbox.org one), just in case someone prefers a more privacy-friendly email than my non-encrypted domain emails, and since neither tuta or Proton are compatible when exchanging encrypted emails, I have both. That being said, I seldom use them: most people simply don’t care about privacy.

I use(d to use) gmail for all crappy online stuff I don’t care much about losing access to. I will probably end up getting rid of it entirely but, to me at least, even though I know it’s possible to do it without a YT account, that would also mean quit watching YT, which is something I still appreciate doing.

“With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker,” Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. “If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left.”

True that. For every nation. And not just with IT services.

But then at the same time those governments (talking from France, btw) do their best to prevent any initiative by making it a hassle to start a business, and by punishing the (unavoidable) failures that starting a business, and taking risks and taking the initiative means. We should encourage people to fail (and start over again), if we want to see a few of them succeed.

Any browser is an alternative to any other browser, IMO.

But they can’t run the same extensions, hence the fact that there is store for FF browsers and another one for chromium browsers. Since people can be very picky regarding their favorite extensions. So, suggesting some FF-based browser as an alternative to a Chromium-based one is the best way to disappoint quite a few potential users… for no good reason.

They all have the same purpose.

Like all computer or phone have the same purpose, still people will prefer one brand over the others, on even in one brand, one model of the other. Despite all of them being phones (or computers). Should we forbid people any choice because you consider it’s not important in you use case?

LibreWolf is not an alternative to chrome, it’s a fork of FF. It won’t run Chrome extensions… which chrome users would likely expect to be able to run.

For a Chrome alternative, I use Vivaldi (which is based in the EU)
As a Firefox alternative, I use Waterfox

LO is good software.

It replaced MSOffice Word for me (and I had been using Word since the early 90s). It also has a few extensions one may want to consider adding. Stuff like extra dictionaries for example, or better (than the default provided) ePub/HTML export tools.

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/

Exactly like we did, my spouse and I also cook and we love that. Alas, it doesn’t change what’s happening (a boost in shit restaurants that are nothing but pretentious fast-food with a fancy name), it make us (and you) less impacted by it, which is nice ;)

What’s sad is that it’s happening everywhere. Not just with restaurants, I mean.

I see the same trend of restaurants becoming fast-foods everywhere. It’s also happening with newspapers or media in general, morphing from news outlets trying to inform people (with a few real turd exceptions) into dedicated and obsessed clickwhores who can’t be bothered to inform and with journalists whose sole worry is to grow their career (with a few real quality exceptions). And it’s also in our education system. And almost everywhere else. More and more, people are settling on crap. They’re ok with eating crap, wearing crap, thinking crap, doing crap, telling crap, and so on. Heck we’re even ok with turning the entire planet into a huge pile of crap. The issue being that crap is bad for health.

With restaurants, it’s kinda sad but OK it’s also not the end of the world as we can go eat elsewhere or, like you said, we can learn to cook.

But when considering the media and the education? What can one do? At least here in France, but as far as I can judge it’s the same in the USA, it’s a real tragedy and a systemic failure at teaching kids anything. Even basic reading skills and math. There are still many bright kids, good schools and good teachers, that’s no question. I’m referring to what kids are being taught in schools on average, and how. Which is what should matter in a functional democracy (rich people will always be able to get their kids the best education possible, they have the money for that). As it is right now, public education is nothing but a systemic failure that not many seem to care about, save regarding its cost. Too bad, as in the very short term it’s those kids themselves that will have to pay dear price for their lack of education, by not being qualified and educated enough. On the longer term, it’s the entire society that will pay a very expensive price, most probably too expensive a price, as one don’t build a bright future when one’s kids can barely read.

Well, that was quite off-topic, I’m sorry for that. It’s just… I worry so much about what I see happening, I worry more about that lack of education than I worry about all the braindead fearmongering talks happening around that orange racist & illiterate clown USA choose to reelect—another sure sign of the catastrophic situation a failed education system can produce: the USA may not realize it yet but as a country and as a super-power they’re broken, deeply. And if they were to fight China tomorrow morning (it should not happen, at least not before they take some time recover from the kick in the nuts they just received from Russia), I would not bet as blindly on them winning like I would have bet on them anytime in the last century or so. I think we’re on a very similar path here in France/EU, a path of extremely extremely proud idiocy and failure, but I want to think we’re not that deep in that shithole yet, that we still could escape such a sad situation. I may be mistaken, somewhere.

Once again, sorry for the rant. I hope you enjoy cooking your meals as much as we enjoy cooking ours ;)

yes. SO much so!

Here in Paris, we still have the choice to go to real nice places (less and less so, mind you or at absurdly fancy prices). I noticed how many restaurants have been replaced or have turned themselves into, well, not restaurants. I mean, not just in those touristic spots where, well, they open to do business with one time customers. I’m talking even in those places where actual Parisians do live and where they want to go eat/have a drink.

There has been a huge shift I don’t know how it happened but I can see the result: many now sell microwaved and over-processed industrial junk food as if it was something real cooking. The same with bakeries btw, which is so effing sad. Many are now nothing more than selling points for bread/pastries that is industrially processed and delivered to their door ready to be heated if not already to be sold. That’s shit.

At the corner of our street, we have that bakery where the owner and his apprentices are still doing every single thing they sell by hand. They work hard, they struggle and, yeah, they’re more expensive than the many non-bakeries everywhere but they’re so fucking tasty and they’re not machines. The guys is doing fine but many like him are not, and they’re forced to close. And then it’s too often one of those ‘bread selling points’ (I refuse to call those a bakery) that is replacing them.

Indeed. But for the last 30 or 40 years anyone trying to raise awareness about that was disqualified in one way or another. It was as painful as when people tried to discuss the necessity of, you know, not delegate EU defense to the USA.

Now, the damage has been done and it’s deep. It will be much more difficult and so, so much more costly to try to get out of that situation… without any assurance we will succeed.

Maybe because we’ve hopped on US for absolutely everything else? Defense, culture, education, societal values (and priorities/focuses). Even for food (posting that from France, surrounded by fast-foods ;)).