Jap2-0

> Has religiosity actually decreased?

This is fair* (and I expect many Christians would agree with you in generalities of "everyone worships something"); what I was getting at here was that (by the first numbers I found) those who regularly attend organized "god-based" worship has dropped by ~1/3 over the past 20 years or so, and so I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools. If the drop is less than that,** that would seem to support the author's hypothesis.

> What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?

Along the same lines as the previous: even if more families aren't able to send their kids to private schools, but desire to do this, the could support two parts of his narrative: (1) decrease in social capital (of which he defines part as, to paraphrase, schools that people trust); and (2) that more essential parts of life (such as education, as opposed to television) are becoming rapidly more expensive.

(Not stating which of his points I agree with, but I think that "private school enrollment is declining" does not necessarily rebut the core of his arguments.)

* Though I think my meaning was clear

** Though of course this becomes more complicated when you look at figures for all private schools

Consistency: the only case where he used BCE is in an image caption. The description on Wikimedia Commons uses BCE, so my guess is that he defaults to writing BC but reading that subconsciously put him in the frame of mind to write BCE. From a skim, he never uses CE or AD in this article.

Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.

> > Teachers can love their students.

> That's just such a weird point to make. It is great that my kids' primary school teachers are super kind and loving. But it's not what they're for, and it's definitely not what AI tutors are for. Nobody is claiming this will replace a hug from a parent.

This doesn't seem weird at all. Developmentally they need (kind, loving) human interaction. That's obviously not the only purpose of teachers, but if you think 7 hours a day without it wouldn't make a difference... just like a computer can't be held accountable, a computer can't have compassion.

At that age especially, play with other kids is time spent learning.

I rarely have online meetings, but what annoyed me most last time I did was that I had multiple AI note taking services magnanimously send me multiple emails each telling me how if I signed up for their service they could share their meeting notes with me. It wasn't even that important of a meeting!

This reminds me of some comments by C.S. Lewis (paraphrasing from memory) on three ways of writing for children, two good and one bad:

- Writing for a specific child (think telling a story to someone specific)

- Writing because you have something to say and a story is how you want to say it

- Writing generally what you think a group of people want (e.g. "children like food so I'm writing a story about food")

I think the essay is available online, he is much more eloquent than I

Firefox has been unloading tabs for several months or so (at least on nightly).

Is that with Firefox's built-in tracking prevention disabled?

Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question:

- They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult

- They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply

- Fish

- They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats

(note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)

For context, the lowest notes on most pipe organs are typically about 33 or 16 Hz (from a pipe that is 8', 16', or 32' long).

Correct.

This disappeared a few months ago for me, unfortunately.