"Normie" and "happens to own one or two extra homes" seem a bit contradictory to me... And doesn't everyone who invests in something that makes them money exploit economic conditions?
Someone said in another comment, that it makes more sense together with the dereference operator, so int *var means: "dereferencing var gets you an int."
I don't really know C, but personally prefer your version.
However, I can also get behind considering the * to be part of the variable, rather than a type: "var is a pointer that happens to hold an int". I mean, maybe they could have used the & operator meaning "var is an address holding an int"? Honestly, it just feels like there's too much tradition and legacy and so on, and what one considers intuitive is the thing that they're most used to.
A somewhat more depressing take:
"There comes a time in everyone's life when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. And you accept that fact - or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors."
(Babylon 5, quoted from memory, so probably not 100% correct)
As I'm nearing 30, still in the "I can be anything I want" phase, I wonder when this time will arrive. And whether it is true for everyone - maybe some people possess the ability to reinvent themselves no matter their age. But can you even do that without giving up some contentment?
I think you are always in this phase of being able to be anything you want. Even as you are growing up, there are usually more choices than you can see. What experience and age gives you is a broader understanding that that really is the case and then, speaking from personal experience, you start feeling foolish for not realizing this before.
That said, changing things is never without some loss of contentment. Even if status quo is abysmal, we humans seem to prefer it over changing it. It is worth exploring, though, even if it is uncomfortable.
"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: 'I shall never play the Dane.'"
You have made an interesting point but I think your arguments would have more force if you exercised some restraint in categorically stating your opinions about what is wrong and in what way as facts, basically.
Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.
As someone with little financial knowledge, I'm curious why that is the case and how those estimates are calculated. I've seen stores offering a discount on cash payments, citing card-related fees as the reason.
I kinda wondered about this forever as well. Then one day I was chilling in my local worker-owned cooperative bakery when the Brinks truck came by to do the bakery's cash pickup. Armed driver. Guard waiting next to the truck holding a long gun. Two guys (presumably armed) going into the business to get the cash and take it out to the truck. That's all pretty expensive!
Smaller family-owned businesses will just take cash to the bank - but it's super common for somebody to eventually surveil them long enough to rob them one day as they're transporting the cash to the bank.
Discount on cash IME is because they're not putting transactions through the till (POS) so they can commit [tax] fraud.
Ran a micro business in UK for 15 years, cash cost as much to deposit as card did - employee time (counting, reconciling, making deposit) and bank charges for cash deposits. It also slowed down transaction time (which was almost all IRL).
Fraud done by shop owners is one reason why they might still offer a discount, but also a lot of the time I simply think stores don't actually realise how much it is costing them.
E.g. they might not include staff time and incidental costs around cash transactions that aren't obvious because they're not linked to the individual transactions, such as reconciliation, time spent transporting the cash, costs of depositing the cash, insurance to cover storage of cash.
Also consider that it takes very little theft to tilt the balance, and even a tiny amount of theft by cashiers not putting through all cash transactions can make a big difference.
> they might not include staff time and incidental costs around cash transactions that aren't obvious because they're not linked to the individual transactions, such as reconciliation, time spent transporting the cash, costs of depositing the cash, insurance to cover storage of cash.
Yep. I worked as a supervisor in retail for a number of years and here's a list of cash handling costs that dont exist with card payments:
Making change on each transaction
Counting cash drawers in and out for each employee shift
Preparing daily bank deposits
Going to the bank to make deposits and get new change
Theft (by employees, external theft wasnt a problem for us)
Cash can be misplaced. Stolen. Needs to be stored securely. Banks often charge fees for depositing large amounts. Security companies charge fees to transport said amounts. Counterfeit bills. Etc.
Hi, when you say you don't know which fingers to move do you mean within the context of a piece of music, or just the scales themselves? For the latter, I can give you some advice (though if you search something like "piano scale fingerings" on Google images, you can probably get some fairly standard fingerings for both hands).
Each diatonic (major, minor or modal) scale consists of 7 distinct notes, and the fingering is always 1-2-3 1-2-3-4 in one direction, and the reverse in the other direction, however, you need to find where this sequence starts within the scale. The more black keys there are in a scale, the fewer the possible comfortable positions. Always put your thumb on a white key, and prefer putting your 3rd and especially your 4th fingers on black keys, if possible. (Fun fact: for the major scales, once you have your right hand's fingering, you can imagine mirroring the keyboard and your hand around the D or G# key and you get another major scale with a good fingering for the left hand).
DO NOT start with C major if it's your first time learning scales. Maybe start with E major (4 sharps) as it is comfortable and you can use the mirrored fingering in the other hand.
I mean, Bartók is really not that random: polytonality, pentatonic and octatonic stuff, whole-tone scales etc. are all things you can practice and put into work in his music. (You can argue that Schönberg is even less random, cause serialism, but that probably doesn't help too much when playing the piano).
As a wildly amateur and unschooled musician Bartók simply looks wildly intimidating. Listen to him (again, as a wildly amateur and unschooled musician) doesn't make him make much more sense.
I wish I'd taken music more seriously when I was a kid (and had better neuroplasticity). I know I could still make decent progress with it, even at nearly 50, but I missed my opportunity to really cozy up to it deeply. (Instead I've got 6502 and 16-bit x86 assembler... Arguably not an even trade.)
