are we raising a generation of nincompoops?

apparently kids no longer know how to use an ice cube tray.

btw i don't really have a position on this article but it seemed too good a thread title to pass up

I have a hard time believing this next year's crop of kindergartners are all going to be wearing Pull-Ups to school. Or, as my prof used to say, "the plural of anecdote isn't data."

i have a hard time not believing i'm going to be working for someone, some day, who's wearing pull-ups.

mark bauerlein lol

. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.

FYI these college kids existed in 1991

i can vouch for them in 2001 too, but then everything changed

http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Criticism-Autopsy-Critical-Authors/dp/0812216253

Same old kids-these-days rant. He mentions a couple of anecdotes and a bunch of stuff completely unsourced and is like "this is how it is."

Oh man, my best friend from high school spent his first four months of college with greasy, oily hair because he hadn't bothered to read the labels the first time he bought shampoo all by himself, and he bought conditioner instead. And didn't notice until the bottle was gone. That shit is comedy gold, imo, I don't know why we wouldn't want these stories still int the public sphere.

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/42509/bush-furman

this is technophobic strawman bullshit, Bauerlein is a fucking moron.

ha the end of that article is actually kind of great

"That's our job as we get old," he said. "A healthy society is healthy only if it has some degree of tension between older and younger generations. It's up to us old folks to remind teenagers: 'The world didn't begin on your 13th birthday!' And it's good for kids to resent that and to argue back. We want to criticize and provoke them. It's not healthy for the older generation to say, 'Kids are kids, they'll grow up.'

"They won't grow up," he added, "unless you do your job by knocking down their hubris."

pretty much OTM as far as I can tell

XXXP naw in 2002 I saw several clueless freshmen doing laundry for the first time. I chided them though, not for their ignorance, but for their pre-9/11 mentalities.

they're complaining abt velcro in that article! i mean how old are these ppl

i kind of agree with him about the hubris, but guess what? sensible parents and educators have been doing this FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS.

geez, some of these anecdotes are more like, are my kids developmentally disables and I never bothered to test them? I mean "the mechanics of a clothes hanger"? i'm pretty sure all teenagers have been clothes shopping.

also, yeah, bauerlein is a hack

Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her “kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger.’’

okay what is going on here

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/42509/bush-furman

― goole, Monday, October 4, 2010 4:49 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this isn't that damning... or maybe it is. i've probably spent too much time with idiot soi-disant rebel academics to know anymore.

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter "literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."

so you're writing a book instead of showing her how to use it? love ya mom!

we need to critically examine the social impact of this new cutting edge "clothes hook" technology imo

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Strange-Take-on-Taxes/27199/

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Simple-Question-About/27104/

Yeah, I was cracking up at "my kids can't use hangers so I figured I'd tell everyone about it rather than show them"

maushart makes her relationship to her children sound like jane gooddall's relationship to her chimps

"my kids are so clueless, they don't know how to do the basic household tasks that i never taught or allowed them to do growing up" y/n?

y, thousand times yes

or maybe " i had kids, hadn't an angle on my next shitty 'quo vadimus' societal epic, so didn't learn them shit about shit then wrote about it.

YOU DON'T NEED TO TEACH A KID HOW TO USE A HANGER.

Studies have shown that it is a skill people are born innately with, such as the ability to breathe.

SLOPPY CLOSETS - SCOURGE OF 21ST CENTURY ADOLESCENCE

good god, this woman, please teach your kids how to fold laundry, clean a toilet, write a check, and cook a simple meal before it's TOO LATE

xxxp to table

well, not the mechanics, sure- the concept, OTOH, still escapes all three of my brothers tbh

"my kids are leaving their clothes all over their room...i swear, with social networks, kids don't even know how to use dressers anymore."

"Twitter- Is it giving your 5 yr old boogers?"

fwiw "nincompoop" belongs on the register of endangered insults

"My daughter doesn't know how to use a can opener; instead of showing her how they work, I decided to tell everyone in an AP article so that the entire nation would think she's stupid."

I know some people treat their kids like playthings but this is all kind of cruel (and hilarious)

thanks to new technology, i can humiliate my daughter in front of an exponentially larger group of people than before in zero time

Like seriously, this should get linked to the cyberbullying threads.

facebook makes it so i can guarantee every single acquaintance of hers knows how much i love little sugar bear

nincompoop btw, from "non compos mentis" = "not of sound mind"

so "are we raising a generation of retards?" is the question posed here, pretty much

But the answer to that is always y

No one at my office seems capable of putting the folded paper towels INTO the wall dispenser, which only requires pushing one plastic button to release the swing-away front. There are no springs, complicated fasteners, dual-action processes requiring two hands -- Christ, the whole thing only requires one finger-touch. And yet.

We give these people salaries, and computers, and trust them with entire sales accounts. I do not understand.

So answer to thread question is pretty much yeah?

On the flip side, I've had to wipe my hands on my pants because even though there's paper visible in the window, the batteries in the dispenser have gone dead and the paper's locked up inside.

"my daughter tried to open a can, but i could see she was frightened. i saw her large bovine eyes widen with anxiety as her claw-like hands scrabbled at the can, searching desperately for a pull-top tab. finding none, she screamed -- a low, rattling moan of wordless distress -- as she slammed the can against the formica countertop, shaking with anger and totally helpless to access the solid white albacore trapped within."

poor little Koko Maushart

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/42640/undoing-white-supremacy

http://www.wikihow.com/Eat-French-Fries

Sewing on a button is equivalent in ease and usefulness to boiling an egg or putting gas in a car.

http://www.wikihow.com/Break-Up-Over-the-Phone

I love the pictures for this one

LOL everything about that entry is hilarious

Or, as my prof used to say, "the plural of anecdote isn't data."

― Mormons come out of the sky and they stand there (Abbbottt), Monday, October 4, 2010 11:44 AM (3 hours ago)

Or, as my prof used to say, "the plural of anecdote isn't data."

I'm totally stealing this.

― kenan, Monday, October 4, 2010 11:43 AM (Yesterday)

whoa i'm stealing this

― k3vin k., Monday, October 4, 2010 2:21 PM (Yesterday)

Surprised neither of you have heard that phrase! Or useful portmanteau "anecdata".

I learn something new every Monday.

Be one hundred percent certain that this is what you want because once the words are said, that's it, the other person will be absolutely aware of your thoughts.

Oh man, is this the ultimate advice for posting on ILX or what?

Haha, I should print that out and hang it up in my cube at work. Or make it my screensaver.

omg this video http://www.howcast.com/videos/385987-How-To-Break-Up-Long-Distance

You will need:
* Honesty
* Consideration
* Civility

I'm having LOLs at all the guys who never 'needed' to learn laundry until their moms weren't around to do it for them. I am totally willing to believe this was not the same for their sisters.

My mom "assigned" the laundry job to my sister while I usually handled dishes, so I never had to do my own laundry until I was living on my own.

when i was nine i felt really horrible about myself because i was staying over at a friend's place and her family asked me to help out with laundry -- i didn't know what i was doing and messed it up. i don't feel so bad now knowing that some COLLEGE FRESHMEN are clueless about laundry.

xp He makes a chart, too! Apparently with the x axis as "length of relationship" and the y axis as "how much of a cock I can act like".

quiz show flat-track bully (darraghmac) wrote this on thread Homeopathy: Medieval Mysticism on board I Love Everything on Feb 4, 2010

the plural of anecdote is not data.

jesus christ am i ever gonna overrepeat this line.

do you guys differentiate between colors and whites? at my house I was taught to throw everything in at once and wash with cold water. my socks and white tees were always sadly grey.

nope

everything on warm permanent press

dark colours, colours, whites. there's always enough for one load of each tbh, wash at 40 or 30 degrees, throw a whitening sheet in with whites

RONG. Wash whites in warm water, separately. Wash like colors in cold. Most shades of dark-but-not-white are ok, if you don't mind a little bit of fade and bleed over time. Don't wash anything in hot water unless it's like infested with vermin or something.

xxxp

Srsly, though, have you ever seen a tag on a piece of clothing instruct you to wash it in hot water? What is the hot setting on the washing machine even for? Special cases, I guess. I have deliberately shrunk a sweater or two.

you should wash every garment seperately in cold water, or just dry clean everything.

which, y'know, is shite. fuck washing all that

think that my white tees all say to wash in hot water

with other whites, yeah fine, but tbh the whitening sheets are p good. save the earth maynneee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQYNkfmnHlo

I use hot water on whites, along w bleach.

Otherwise kenan otm.

I sort clothes as follows:

Whites - warm water w/ a little bleach, dryer
Colors - cold water, dryer.
Delicates - cold water, short cycle, hang to dry. Sometimes I divide these into dark and light because this is mostly work work clothes and I want to keep them nice and avoid getting white lint from a sweater all over my black pants.
Towels (to avoid linting up all my other clothes) - warm water, dryer.

Other tips: white vinegar in a Downy Ball for fabric softener is: 1) cheaper; 2) easier on your clothes; 3) helps forestall pilling; 4) helps towels stay absorbant by not coating it with softening stuff; and 4) if you are washing a bunch of technical stuff, like running clothes, this will help deodorize them and maintain their wicking abilities. You only need like a quarter cup of bleach to brighten your whites a little. Biz (US, I have no idea what its UK equivalent might be) is a fantastic additive for a particularly grimy load.

I love doing laundry.

I even made my own laundry detergent, which makes me feel like a huge dork, but I get all excited every time I use it. Recipe #4, here - http://tipnut.com/10-homemade-laundry-soap-detergent-recipes/

hmm bleach u say?

hot water for bedsheets? bed bugs n that.

You have me reading the laundry labels on my white t-shirts, damn you people.

"Machine wash cold, do not bleach." Yeah, fuck you, Ralph Lauren. It's a white t-shirt.

"Machine wash warm, use non chlorine bleach." That seems to be the the standard for everything else. "Non-chlorine bleach" seems like they don't want to be blamed when it falls apart, though. It's not actual cleaning advice.

the lice hate the powdered sugar iirc

What do I wash my hair in to get the mind-reading nanobots out of it?

Mr Veg does all our laundry, separates the whites & coloureds etc: I just do the folding.

Had to Google this: http://www.textileaffairs.com/lguide.htm

hoo boy

we actually have so much shit that we can legitimately do loads broken out as:

black/dark blue
light blue/gray
green/brown
tan/yellow
red/pink
white outerwear
colored underwear
white underwear
colored towels
white towels

typing this out has done more to make me painfully aware of how much inessential shit we have than any amount of attempting to send shit to Goodwill/Salvation Army

Kenan, you're going to make some Chicagoland family one hell of a Mr. Belvedere one day.

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVgKiadhVJk&feature=related

i mostly just wash everything in cold water (including whites) and bleach whites separately in hot water when necessary.

detergent of choice: arm & hammer powder, perfume- and dye-free

xp Does Peggy Lee sound there like someone that Simon Cowell would tear limb from limb, or is that just because she's next to Frank?

peggy lee is amazing. simon cowell is a vile twat.

I'm just saying, kinda breathy there, kinda half-assed.

Who needs nincompoops when we've already raised a generation of self-appointed critics?

today's young women just don't know how to pose gracefully in an elephant's tusk.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9tjvtbyQs1qbyf2jo1_500.jpg

There is something terribly wrong with the world, and I have just realized what it is.

elephant garters?

^ yes.

I'll take my book advance now, please.

Enjoy eating fries any time of the day as a snack

Every time I see this thread title I think of the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

^ new suspect in the JKF/RFK shootings?