The main difference I see is that when a professional wants to read something very thoroughly, they employ techniques of what’s called slow reading. That’s usually when the highlighter comes out along with note-taking materials.

This is possible with print information because of how much of it is put in front of your eyes at once. Rereading a paragraph, even a half dozen times to guarantee you fully understood it, is very easy with print. It is not with audio. Flipping back to page xxx to check something, also very easy with print and less so with audio. Smoothly speeding up/slowing down your rate of consumption to match the complexity of the current topic, also easier with text than audio. Etc etc.

So, for casual consumption, they’re fairly equivalent and both fine. But if you wanted to claim mastery of a complex topic after putting years of intensive effort in, I’d say that probably required some reading that could not have been replaced by listening, and if you did no reading, I’m going to be a little doubtful of your mastery of the knowledge. It’s possible to still understand what you need to, of course, but you definitely neglected what is usually the most efficient, reliable method by far.

So, a few years ago this stuff was fine. You can’t spin up a brand new global supply chain overnight, and that was generally understood and accepted, just like how we couldn’t find enough 155mm arty ammo for awhile. These things take time, and that’s okay. And fine, we weren’t predicting the Iran War, and that would definitely interfere with plans. Fine.

This is all getting less acceptable as time goes on, though. Now 2027 is a reasonable goal, that’s five years from the start of the main invasion. Let’s just hope we can stick to it.

Except that in my experience, even a supporter of said party, when talking about how a member of ours “just toes the line” is communicating a negative, not a positive. That’s not a good, genuine guy we’re proud of, it’s someone to watch out for.

Colloquially too, the way I was raised, it’s a bad thing, you did not want to be a line-toer. And I’m not referring to discussions of politics, but how it was used in day to day conversation. I’ve been accused of toeing lines, for instance, with the implication being that continuing may get me in trouble some day and I should be a little more careful.

Perhaps it’s a regional thing.

The same dynamic I was discussing appears in that case as well. The politician may not agree with the policy, and may be willing to violate it, but still toes the party line.

If someone was doing something somewhat shady, but still keeping within the bounds of some rule, you might say they are similarly toeing that line.

The big question to me has become, can you toe a line in a positive way?

Yeah, I just made another edit to my original comment. lol

For the traditional toe the line imagery, it helps to imagine a very rebellious kid that you have firmly told to absolutely not cross some line under any circumstances.

Imagine the kid looking you dead in the eye and smirking, as they stretch out their big toe and put it all over the line while barely not crossing it.

This captures the aspect that you don’t have to follow the spirit of the rules or believe in them in any way, you simply have to follow the letter of the instruction to be “toeing the line”. There is an inherent malicious coloring to the term that is important, where people that only toe the line are bad people.

edit: It needs to imply that you’re searching for ways to break a rule and get away with it on a technicality.

edit2: This got me curious enough to google the origin of the term, and it actually has a wikipedia article, amusingly. Apparently it has a military origin, and the article makes no mention of the negative connotations I mentioned. This makes me think my personal interpretation is actually incorrect, and I now wonder why I picked up on it. In the US, toeing the line does have a subtle negative connotation to it, and people that do it are looked down on somewhat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line

Sugar addiction is a thing.

I feel like if you avoided giving it long-term goals you could still retain most of your humanity. You could also mainly rely on the divination aspect, and avoid the perfect-execution aspect unless necessary.

Would still be the world’s greatest crutch, but the sheer power it offers is too tempting.

Gonna have to be more specific. What part of life?

Path to Victory, from Wildbow’s web serial Worm.

It’s a two-part power. The first looks into the future to determine the exact set of steps necessary to accomplish any given goal, if it is at all possible to accomplish in any way. The second makes you execute those exact steps with zero chance of deviation or error.

It only fails when interfered with by another power also capable of seeing the future.

edit for grammar

Ultimately, I think it’s a convenient excuse to cover for how truly difficult it is to teach people important things.

The adult mostly doesn’t actually remember the specific logical and/or experiential steps that contributed to whatever understanding they now have. The events are too disconnected in time, and too large in quantity to really parse that way. You need that background info to teach well, though, otherwise you can’t handle questions, you can’t explain, etc, which are all genuinely important parts of teaching.

So, it’s easier to just handwave the problem away and focus on going to work, whatever is for dinner tonight, what’s going on in the neighborhood, cleaning the house, etc etc etc, and leave the teaching to the ostensibly qualified people.

If you want to attempt to do things differently, when you learn something life-lessony, remember that to teach it to a teenager someday, it’s not good enough to have just learned the thing. You’re also going to have to be able to offer a decent-enough explanation and answer any questions.

I have a feeling that an actual martial law declaration would be enough to motivate a general strike.

This actually happened when early nationalists tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic in interwar Germany. Some old generals and their men took over the capital and declared themselves in charge of the country. A general strike was declared, and the whole country shut down. The generals were then left “in charge” of a totally shut down society. Needless to say, the coup lasted a short enough time that it’s usually not even mentioned in world history lessons. This whole event pre-dated Hitler’s first beer hall putsch by like a decade or something, if memory serves.

This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We’re overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.

At least we’re solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.

It’s really just recent history.

Personally I think it’s okay so long as you give proper credit somewhere to the original artist, and are willing to stop if they ask you to.

Yes, there probably are. Is that important?

Don’t feel bad about it. He’s basically saying he thinks you’re too cool to actually be real, so you must be fake. Seems like a compliment to me.

No, it’s been around for awhile. In US law, any book over 95 years old is considered public property, and can be shared for free. So, there’s volunteers that take old books and scan them, then put the digital versions online for everybody.

If you’d like to make digital copies of things from your native language/culture and add them to the collection, I imagine that’d probably be fine. I’m not part of the project though, so I don’t know the details of how these are submitted/who you need to talk to/etc.

For space/astronomy news, I recommend Doctor Becky https://youtube.com/@drbecky and Fraser Cain. https://youtube.com/@frasercain

Becky handles mostly astronomy news, Fraser handles mostly space flight news. Both are pretty decent at staying more objective.

How do they treat those that are “beneath” them? Customer service workers, pets, kids, etc. Anyone that they should have some sort of authority over.