It’s the Web 2.0 model of corralling people into walled garden platforms, where they’re driven insane. One day people will look back at this time and wonder what we were thinking.

This is a comprehensive list of right answers.

The absolute best way is immersion. Full on survival, sink or swim, daily brain exhaustion to cram information in that you will use, over and over.

Short of that, finding ways to practice using the language is the key. Listening to videos is fine, but you need to simulate thinking and responding to make the language part of what your brain goes to. Find people online to talk to via Zoom or discord. I like to think of conservations I have and translate them in Google and re-run the interaction 4 or 5 times in the second language.

For numbers, find videos online that are things like lottery draws.

Bon chance!

My screen timeout is a minute, so they likely can’t get very far before bumping the side button or just not babysitting it for 60 seconds and needing a long password or fingerprint. Any app worth looking at needs a fingerprint as well, so even if unlocked, not super valuable short of a highly coordinated, personally targeted attack. In which case Pegasus would be easier and faster.

Plus, I always “pull over” and hold my phone with two hands when in a busy public place.

Hard agree.

I genuinely never begrudge anyone reclining back into me, because I will pass that right along to whoever is behind me.

What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.

And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.

Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.

Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.

This really fails to acknowledge the hodegpode, anything goes chaos that was towns choosing their own noon based around someone with a watch and a bell looking at the shadow on a stick a few times a year.

Sometimes standardization isn’t simply a terror induced by capitalism, and has accrual benefits.

Well, the result of railroads needing to standardize time tables.

Prior to that, towns had their own local time, and often it was approximate at best, based on a guy looking at a shadow and keeping time with inaccurate tools.

Imagine trying to explain to the people of Bumblefuck, IA that the train departs Nowheresville, IA at 10:30, and is a 30 minute trip, but the train arrives in Bumblefuck at 10:52 because the town clock is the one guy that winds his watch every day.

Don’t sleep on aspirin and netti pot.

At some point blowing your noise over and over leads you to to basically harm your sinuses and swelling that makes it hard to breathe.

Source: had to do it literally this morning. Worked all day.

Also, avoid inflammatory things like tons of carbs, delicious red meat, whiskey, and beer, etc.

Aw, dammit. See, I would have showed up as late to that party as if I had done it today.

I wouldn’t try and prove anything.

I would “invent” a few basic tchotchkis and nick-nacks to get money, then out to California ahead of the Gold Rush Hollywood? to …something, I dunno, and buy land.

Invent a couple variations on heat pumps and electric motors. By 1928 sail away to New Zealand.

Yeah, it’s a big part of why I stopped participating in reddit. Any hobby or skill subreddit has driven off anyone truly knowledgeable and is a constant flood of images of someone doing the “Fisher Price My First _____” level thing and a title like "guys, am I doing this right? :3” for karma. Actual questions bring out toxic opinion-farmers. It’s pointless.

There’s actually several overlapping societal issues at play.

First, a distrust of experts. Especially doctors unless it’s doctors giving away medical advice or confirming biases like “sure, you like butter? Im a doctor, butter makes you healthy. Eat more butter.”

Next, both the availability of research and experiences online does mean it IS actually easier to find, validate for yourself, and share knowledge. But thats also mixed up in people that feel close enough to knowledgeable experts after dabbling in something 2 or 3 times.

Both of these things are also in the context of, for lack of a better term, the overall entitlement of people online to seek and deserve to find easy solutions that make them feel good. So when experts chime in with technical, rational, or sophisticated options that truly are better, they might expect to get blasted as “gate keeping” and be disincentivized from being post of a community, leaving the sophomoric “I’m no expert” crowd as the loudest group that’s barely competent enough to impress newbies and no one else.

Well, you do use it, but just the one time.

Nice try, pickpocket on the metro

Not sure, other than a general combo of “question everything” and understanding the scientific method. I’ve never had to teach it before.

Yeah, not revolutionary - critical thinking is a skill that’s fundamental to so much else. Its like learning to read or cook. The base skill let’s your learn more.

Not at all, I’m saying that many smaller problems people often cite are simply symptoms of a lack of critical thinking.

This covers so many other things.

My usual specific go-to is how to search the internet for things. But not knowing how to search for hyper-specific things is the symptom of a lack of critical thinking skills.

This 100%. Even the kids version is good.