Lurker > adjl

Krow_Incarnate posted...

The thing is in the full video, she not only didn't really try and deescalate the customers, but she threw something at them which really set things off to the point where they were throwing chairs.

First off, fuck those people. They're scumbags from the start.

But she didn't do a particularly great job from a customer service standpoint.

Yeah, as much as it's easy to resent the corporate policy of throwing employees involved in customer altercations under the bus, when they actively escalate the situation, it's pretty reasonable to decide that they shouldn't be a part of the company anymore.

Of course, it'd be nice if corporate took some responsibility for the entitled dickwads that have been created by decades of "the customer is always right," since that's what brought about such behaviour from the customers in the first place, but that's a much larger issue.

LinkPizza posted...

And you cant read an article saying heres what strains are dangerous since thats only one factor on its own

You can, actually. I can't be bothered to fish out exact numbers, but if memory serves, Alpha was somewhere on the order of 50-70% more dangerous than the wild type, Beta was ~20% more dangerous than Alpha, Delta was ~150% more dangerous than Beta, and Omicron dropped back to about 20-30% more dangerous than the wild type (while being 6 or 7 times more contagious). It's hard to pin down exact figures on that because treatment improved so much from the early days of dealing with the wild type to when Omicron became the dominant variant, but it's fairly easy to at least rank them, if not quantitatively compare them.

That information, however, is generally useless for laypersons because identifying a specific strain requires a more in-depth PCR test than the typical one (let alone the rapid tests that comprise the vast majority of Covid tests these days), so a given patient isn't likely to ever know anything beyond "I'm Covid positive." That really only comes up in doing things like wastewater testing to determine the relative incidence of a given strain in the population, which in turn informs public health agencies so they can (try to) respond accordingly.

That information is also only useful for determining relative risk: You cannot say that, because a patient has Omicron and not Delta, they will not die. Only that they're less likely to. Omicron being a less severe disease does not preclude it from being severe enough to kill the patient, which is going to be based on other factors. Those rankings are based on broad statistical analyses with large enough sample sizes to (hopefully) eliminate random variation in other factors (or at least reduce it to insignificant levels).

MagicalPrincess posted...

Nope. Jesus is not behind that by any means.

You probably shouldn't take infectious disease advice from a carpenter who predates germ theory by 1800-odd years.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

So then what are the factors? I should be able to point out someone who died, and science should be able to tell me why they died. Science should be able to tell me why I didn't. "A variety of factors" is not an answer.

When has science ever been able to do that for any disease, let alone one this new? Short of running extensive diagnostics every hour on newly-infected people to see how their bodies are changing, the only actual options are to conduct autopsies on the dead to see what broke, or to look at whatever records are available to identify statistical correlations after the fact. Autopsies are limited in what they can do, and correlations don't necessarily mean anything until you've collected enough data to be able to infer a causal relationship, and that kind of data is hard to come by for an emerging disease.

Science is only ever a product of scientists' best guesses. Always has been. A lot of people did not know this going into the pandemic, since their understanding of science consists entirely of what's published as accepted fact, so getting to watch the cutting edge of science struggle to catch up to Covid has been really confusing because nobody knows as much as they expect them to. This is, in fact, completely normal for new science. If anything, it's going much faster than it usually does, due to the high stakes, but I still fully expect it to be another 5+ years before we get anything resembling a definitive understanding of the factors contributing to Covid's mortality.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

The fact that you suggest older people would probably die from this suggests that there is something to figure out. There are at the very least patterns to discern about who lives and who dies.

There are, but many of them aren't controllable or easily identifiable. Heck, there's strong evidence to suggest that a single nucleotide substitution inherited from a single act of interbreeding between a human and a neanderthal 60,000 years ago more than doubles the chance of serious complications or death, which is ridiculously specific. There are absolutely patterns, but the vast majority of them are identified restrospectively instead of having any useful predictive power, and given that the disease is barely 3 years old and is still evolving pretty rapidly, that identification is very much a work in progress.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

EDIT: Also the vaccine isn't harmless. Know what else is killing people? Heart complications from vaccines. In a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, I've picked the poison I believe I have the best chance of surviving.

And you believe that because you have an incomplete understanding of the statistics. Yes, there are risks associated with both options, but all available evidence points to the vaccine being the lower risk option for anyone without an actual allergy to its components. There have been zero confirmed deaths associated with myo(peri)carditis following mRNA vaccines, and the rate of blood clots and associated fatality following the adenoviral vaccines (A-Z, Janssen) is lower than the rate of blood clots and associated fatality from being infected with Covid itself.

It's about as "damned if you do, damned if you don't" as having a heart attack and choosing not to do to the hospital because of the risk of dying in a car accident on the way there: Risks exist for either alternative, but one option is clearly much more dangerous than the other.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

Also, the vaccine protects me, not the old people. I can still catch it and throw it, it's just the symptoms would be more manageable for me. And only me.

It makes you less likely to be infected (and therefore contagious) in the first place, it makes you less contagious once you are infected (if nothing else, milder symptoms means less coughing), and it means you're contagious for a shorter period (creating fewer exposure opportunities). The personal health benefit may be greater than the public health benefit, but that doesn't mean there's no public health benefit.

Zareth posted...

My account is 20. I've been here more than half of my life

This. I was 13 when I made my account, 33 now.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

what we aren't spending enough time figuring out is how come I'm cruising but other people are dying?

The same reason pneumonia kills millions every year while others just feel a bit icky: Medicine, diseases, and the immune system are extremely complicated and there are countless factors that can influence a given infection's prognosis. Genetics, immune function, other conditions, the exact strain you're infected with, the size of your initial pathogen load, vaccination status... There are enough factors that are outside of anyone's control that attributing it to more than blind luck is little more than guesswork. The best you can do is take the steps that are well-known to reduce risk (like getting vaccinated and wearing a mask) and hope for the best.

What gets me about the whole "don't depict Muhammad" thing is that the root concern is that doing so risks presenting the depiction as an idol and distracting from the things Muhammad represents. At its core, that's a moderately sensible philosophy, but to go from that to "anyone who depicts Muhammad must be made to suffer, regardless of the context" just makes no sense, especially when it's non-Muslims doing so who are neither supposed to be worshipping Muhammad nor are in any risk of worshipping the depiction as an idol.

If anything, it seems that some Muslims worship the absence of depictions of Muhammad as an idol, above what he actually represents.

DrunkCaveman posted...

Women don't want to hear something technically impressive, they want to hear something pleasing and emotional.

Really, that applies to a lot of people. Appreciating something technically impressive generally involves sitting down and paying attention to it, which is a decision somebody will have to make on their own. Appreciating something that just feels nice, however, can be done in passing without having to dedicate any time or attention to doing so. This is largely why pop music tends to be simple emotional stuff and not technically challenging stuff.

The zipper approach is objectively the best, but it only works if the majority do it that way. They don't, so the next best option is to start signalling and look for an opening/hope somebody lets you in.

HornedLion posted...

But I think they learned from D3 and Mobile.

They "learned" what they can and can't get away with, which generally won't actually have been a surprise because they research this stuff pretty exhaustively before trying it out. D3's RMAH wasn't removed because they realized it was a mistake, it was removed because they felt they'd made all the money they could from it and stood to make more by making the game work better. Immortal's monetization isn't because they didn't realize there would be a backlash to needing to spend six figures to finish a character, it's because they (correctly) predicted that the handful of people willing to spend six figures on their character (or lacking the impulse control not to, because who doesn't like exploiting mental illness for fun and profit?) would generate more revenue than more reasonable monetization strategies.

The thing a lot of people don't seem to understand in these discussions is that the D3's RMAH wasn't an accident. Immortal wasn't an accident. In both cases, they served exactly the purposes that the higher-ups making the decisions wanted from them, which is to make far more money than simply letting the dev team create a good game would have. Acitblizz won't have learned from those mistakes because they weren't mistakes. They were representations of exactly what they wanted for each game, and there's every reason to believe that they want it for D4 as well.

Will D4 be outright pay-to-win? Probably not. They know that they would sacrifice a lot of sales by doing that to a main series game, especially after committing to not doing so (which, again, is blatantly a matter of making Immortal terrible, then saying "we won't be that bad" to win PR points even though they're still doing far worse than would have been acceptable a decade ago). Will they be monetizing every aspect that they think they can get away with without being called P2W and doing everything in their power to manipulate players into buying the stuff they insist is "optional"? Absolutely, and I fully expect that the early stages of the game will be specifically designed to lull people into thinking it won't be that bad.

darkknight109 posted...

The English language was a mistake.

Sounds like somebody is very much not feeling the Englussy today.

ZangsBeard posted...

It would depend on their personal preference.

This is the only correct answer. If you aren't sure, "parent" is a neutral option to which you can default, which is why you've already used it to refer to a parent of unknown gender.

Usually one game per platform. Sometimes I'll have one game ongoing on PC and another on Switch, but for the most part I'll stick to one at a time. I used to bounce around a lot more, but I've settled down in recent years, probably mostly because my backlog is pretty daunting and I don't feel like I can make any progress on it unless I commit to finishing each game.

I wouldn't necessarily say "most businesses," since there are tons of small businesses run by people that are genuinely passionate about what they do and want to do it well, but certainly most (if not all) of the more successful larger businesses, which will represent the majority of day-to-day commerce for most people. Customer service is simply a means to an end, for those businesses. If it were found that kicking customers in the balls on their way into the store increased the amount they spent, Walmart would be buying steel-toed boots for their greeters.

That's not a word. It's a suffix.

Because they think it's the best way to maximize their profits in that situation. Exactly why they think that is going to vary from situation to situation, including the possible answer of "because they're dumb and don't understand how to handle the problem," but the bottom line is the bottom line of their thought process.

Count_Drachma posted...

I feel like you're assuming the Twitter demographic is much older than it actually is, unless Twitter's average age really is in the 60s.

The vast majority of younger people also aren't very computer literate. They know how to do more things on computers than older generations, by simple virtue of spending more time on them, but that doesn't translate into actually understanding how they work, how to fix them, or how to avoid some of the more common problems. That includes more nuanced security concerns like this; they may know better than to click on links in emails about expired Apple ID's, but thinking through online security to enough of an extent to ask "how can I minimize the harm caused to me if this service is hacked?" is more than most users - of any demographic - will do.

If I have a 2-litre bottle, I'll pour it into a glass. If I have smaller bottles or cans, I'll drink directly from them. I pretty rarely drink pop at all these days, though, so it's very unusual for me to have a bottle or can and more commonly I just get it dispensed from a machine as part of an order from a restaurant.

GanglyKhan posted...

Guess we need to ban cars, kitchen knives, even fire and electricity.

(Yes, I get your point, but it was worded horribly and does not have any weight to it. There are thousands of potentially unsafe things we all use every day.)

I mean, those things are pretty strongly restricted already. Less so kitchen knives, but if the government tried to put even half of the licensing, training, and safety controls on gun ownership and usage that cars have, the GOP and their fan club would riot.

HornedLion posted...

And if its about some internal company drama, that really doesnt effect my dungeon diving.

"I don't mind paying rapists so long as I get to play my vidjergames."

Beyond that, Blizzard tanked any chance they had of me trusting their new releases with Reforged. They've conclusively indicated that they're not above actively breaking games I already own for the sake of making their new ones more attractive (not just in the sense of shutting down servers), and while that backfired hard enough that I doubt they're going to try it again any time soon, they aren't getting a cent from me until they can prove to me that they won't continue to push that envelope. In a similar vein, everything that's been seen so far is suggesting that they're going to be monetizing D4 as hard as they can get away with. While it's not going to be as egregious as Immortal (which I strongly suspect was made as bad as it was in part as a deliberate effort to make 4 look better by comparison), that's still just not something I feel like involving myself with. Diablo's not the only ARPG on the block anymore. If I'm in the mood for one, I can get my fix without having to deal with Blizzard's nonsense.

HornedLion posted...

DIABLO IV will give people WAY more hours of gameplay than Zelda.

Game length doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of overall appraisal. Sure, it's the only objective measure of value there is for games (specifically, hours per dollar), but it doesn't really factor in at all in determining how excited I am for an upcoming game, nor in how great I think a game was after I finish it. I'm not about to call WoW the best game ever, after all, despite putting more play time into it (~250 days by the time I quit) than probably any other game I've played. I can quite happily say that I enjoyed playing BotW for ~80 hours more than I enjoyed playing D3 for 200 (and I've actually considered going through BotW again, whereas the thought of going back to D3 just makes me feel pre-emptively bored).

Leftover Indian food from last night. Tomorrow is baked beans, then later in the week I'll be doing Moroccan chicken with eggplant and apricots.

The notion of giving people different viewing orders reminds of the Clue movie, where there were three different endings and they sent different versions to each theatre. That'd turn out very differently in today's world, with the Internet and all, but in 1985 I can only imagine how hilariously confusing that must have been for people talking about it with friends that went to different theatres.

Homemade is delicious, but it's hard to beat the convenience factor of "open bag, stick in pot" that store bought stuff offers. Making it from scratch is easier than one might think, but it still takes enough time and effort that I reserve it for when I want to do something special/fancy.

Well there's a couple of parents that shouldn't be seeing the light of day for a good long while.

Judgmenl posted...

Apathy is not depression.

It's a major part of depression. As much as many people think that depression is mostly a matter of feeling sad, it's more accurately described as not feeling much of anything.

SinisterSlay posted...

But moving past trailers. Turn based nearly always produces flashier effects because again time stops during these effects. In FF7 they blow holes in the planet, blow up a star. In LoD your thrown into space and dropped on the planet. Going more recent (and funny) Neptune teams up and literally blows up the planet, then says "don't worry, this is just an animation".

Cinematic stuff like that tends not to be as satisfying as something that actually lines up with what you're doing, though. It's cool to watch, but you're basically just pushing play on a short movie when you trigger attacks like that, which doesn't give as much sense of actually being involved in the battle. It can also get really repetitive when they're animations that happen frequently, hence animations usually get turned off or skipped for games like Disgaea where you're using these 30-second animations literally thousands of times.

Zacek posted...

The day Dragon Quest adopts the full action system, that day the turn-based combat will die.

Not really. That may be the end of Squenix trying to make it work (though it's not like the recent turn-based games they've made haven't done decently well, like Bravely Default outright surprising them with its reception), but as I and others have pointed out, Squenix is not the only game in town. So long as there's a demand for turn-based games (and there always will be), somebody will keep making them, even if that somebody isn't a leading AAA publisher.

Far-Queue posted...

Zeus is big on incest, too. Loves fucking his own family members

To be fair, after fathering pretty much everyone everywhere, he doesn't have much by way of non-related prospects.

"I can be entertained without being challenged" is not the same as "I can't be entertained if I am challenged."

Count_Drachma posted...

Assuming people just signed up with an alt email, it's still probably the same level of security and safety? Guess anybody who signed up with a publicly-identifiable email could have issues, but 99% of people aren't going to be impacted.

Why would you assume that? Yes, some people use alt emails for sign-ups like that, but you're grossly overestimating the computer competence of the average person if you think that even a majority of users used an email that isn't actually tied to whoever the account is meant to represent, let alone 99% of them.

Major AAA titles have mostly moved away from it (Pokemon aside), but that's mostly because it doesn't really lend itself to the cinematic spectacles a lot of them want to be. AAA publishers are still publishing smaller turn-based games, and the indie market is full of them.

Video games are supposed to be interactive entertainment. Sometimes, a challenge is part of making them entertaining. Sometimes it isn't. That depends on the nature of the game, the director's vision, and what the audience wants. If you find you can't be entertained without significant a challenge, then games that don't offer a significant challenge aren't for you, and that's okay. Not every game has to be catered to your liking, and you don't have to like every game.

Cacciato posted...

Glad to know if Im injected with COVID I wont get COVID since it was only designed to infect through the lungs. Fuckin Christ.

Potentially, yeah. A pathogen that grows on mucus membranes isn't necessarily going to be able to grow in the blood, and it's not like the blood is just going to transport it to its preferred site. I wouldn't recommend trying it, for obvious reasons, but it's completely plausible that it would work that way.

Yellow posted...

In general, respiratory viruses are not known to be transmitted by blood transfusion, and there have been no reported cases of transfusion-transmitted coronavirus worldwide.

It's worth noting that all that means is that receiving a blood transfusion from a Covid-positive donor won't infect the recipient with Covid. Actually injecting Covid into the bloodstream is a different sort of exposure than what those findings address.

Yellow posted...

At the start of the pandemic we made a big deal out of washing our hands to stop covid, but since then we've learned more about it.

That wasn't because there were concerns about it infecting people through their skin. It was because there were concerns about transferring it to the respiratory system from people's hands, trough the mouth, nose, or eyes.

Tag365 posted...

If dyes are considered by many to be harmful to animals, why do people use dyes on their own hair? That makes no sense, it sounds like it might not be safe for any living being by that logic.

Off the top of my head (pun not intended):

• Humans dye hair that covers a very small percentage of their total skin surface area, as opposed to dyeing an animal's entire body
• Humans don't typically lick their hair, dyed or otherwise
• Humans have a lower surface area:mass ratio than most pets (which translates directly into lower concentrations of any dermal toxins)
• Human hair and animal hair have different compositions and therefore may require different dye formulations
• Being non-toxic for humans doesn't necessarily translate to being non-toxic for animals
• Products sold for human use tend to be better tested and regulated than products sold for animal use
• Whatever dangers the dyes do carry, those are dangers that people choose to subject themselves to, which is fundamentally different from forcing a creature that cannot consent to face them

More than any of that, though, it's less a question of whether or not the dyes are dangerous and more a question of how feasible it is for those responsible for ensuring the animals' safety to figure out whether or not the dyes are dangerous. More often than not, all they can really go on is the word of the owner/groomer/whoever dyed the animal, and given that people don't usually admit guilt that freely, that's not very helpful. To that end, if your goal is to prevent animals from being poisoned by harmful dyes, a blanket ban on all dyes is the easiest and most effective way to make that happen. While that does mean harmless dye jobs are also going to be prohibited, that's not really a major loss because it's not something that's at all necessary for anyone to do, so calling it an acceptable casualty is reasonable.

party_animal07 posted...

So scroll passed the topic about the person you don't know/care about.

Personally, I came in here because I was curious who it was, since even though I don't recognize the name off-hand it's certainly possible that he might have been involved in something I do follow more closely. Evidently, I wasn't the only one.

Eh, it's morphologically valid. A little linguofabrication never hurt anyone.

hypnox posted...

Yeah I mean the guy had a massive Youtube presence that included cross overs with many other famous youtubers, he was a world renown racer, had his own shoe line, was featured in many youtube recaps, and countless other things. But yeah, I mean some of the people on this page do live under a rock.

Even if we just play a straight numbers game and presume that all of his subscribers were American, having 2 million subscribers means you've got a ~0.6% chance that a randomly selected American subscribes to him. Even if we generously say that 10 people know who he is for every actual subscriber, that's still only 6%, and given that PotD has less than 100 regular users (to make a very rough estimate), it's well within statistical expectations that only 3-4 people would know of him. And that's without considering that a video game website that hasn't been genuinely relevant since the early 2000's is likely to have a disproportionately lower number of people interested in sports of any sort.

It's not a matter of living under a rock. It's a matter of him just not being famous enough for people that aren't already invested in his field to know of him.

It doesn't help that the signatures of people that have to sign lots of things are rarely just a matter of writing their name in their handwriting. It's often a heavily simplified set of motions that they execute from pure muscle memory, so replicating that with a bit of practice isn't nearly as hard as people would like to believe.

They're not without their own issues, but I much prefer digital signatures where possible. No messing around with printing and scanning, no need to find a pen, no RSI's, actual confirmation of who signed it and when, much harder to forge... If the knowledge of how to do it would just become a little more commonplace so I could stop having to send documents back to my superiors with a reminder that copy+pasting a photo of their signature or typing their name in a cursive-looking font don't count as digital signatures, we'd be golden.

Death isn't nearly the binary situation people like to think it is. There are a whole lot of different metrics that come into play in trying to define it and things can get super vague if you try to drill it down to technicalities. As far as colloquial speech needs to be concerned, if he's still alive now, he wasn't dead.

I keep reading the title as "catnip."

Hard_Light posted...

random joe in receivables has no possible way to know if that signature was actually written by the right person or not, so what the f*** is the point of needing it

Mostly as a verification step if a problem shows up later. If Bob signed for the package Joe delivered, then later tries to claim it wasn't delivered, Joe can pull out the signature and compare it to other examples of Bob's handwriting to prove that Bob is lying.

Of course, if Bob intends to lie, there's nothing stopping him from giving a phony signature when the package is delivered, so it's not exactly the most secure system. Still, though, that's the theory.

If DeSantis ends up winning the primary, I fully expect Trump to run as an independent and split the Republican vote pretty hard.

By the sound of it, he wasn't walking in front of it, it just started rolling without him and he got injured trying to catch up and stop it.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Requiring id for voting is wrong, but requiring it for porn is right?

Such a weird country.

This is a Republican law, and they also want voter ID (entirely for the sake of making it harder for people to vote, since that tends to favour Republicans).

Huh. My mistake, I didn't read the full article text.

Judgmenl posted...

This will be an amazing fair use case if only Net Neutrality were still a thing.

Net Neutrality being a thing would prevent ISP's from making that decision themselves, but I don't think it would prevent the government from making the decision for them.

Hard_Light posted...

also just...go on reddit and find various peoples number to use specifically to get around it

i'm absolutely positive there would be a subreddit specifically for it

Looking into it further, it looks like they're enforcing the use of a state-run app that digitizes driver's licenses, so I don't know if borrowing somebody else's license number would be enough. That said, unless the site keep close tabs on which licenses have been used (which creates huge data security concerns, both for privacy and potentially identity theft), it'll probably be possible to use one license multiple times (that'll be necessary for using the sites from multiple locations/devices anyway), so perhaps it'll be possible to share it that way.

The wording of the law also just stipulates that sites that fail to enforce that verification can be sued for damages resulting from minors using them, which will be almost impossible to actually prove. If nothing else, the law only applies to sites that consist of 33% or more pornographic content (which actually means the major sites could exempt themselves by uploading two copies of a cat video for every porn one), but 33% of a site like Reddit is still plenty of porn to be "damaged" by and the sites charged with those "damages" can easily just point out that somebody else would have inflicted them if they hadn't.

He wasn't the one who dyed the dog, so he shouldn't have been fined for dyeing it, but he should have been fined for purchasing a dyed animal because that's also illegal under the same law that prohibits dyeing them.

blu posted...

And it feels bad just taking the time off to play video games, like I shouldve worked and got the money.

You already worked and earned the time off. There's no reason to feel bad about making use of it however you want.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Doesn't seem super enforceable.

It's easy enough to enforce. If a site doesn't meet the necessary verification standards for anyone visiting from Louisiana, require all ISP's that operate in the state to blacklist it. Offer a reasonable bounty to anyone that reports a site in violation so they don't have to pay a government employee to trawl the pornternet for offenders, and you're pretty much covered.

Of course, it's still a stupid decision and largely a waste of time (presumably, the concern is protecting children, but there's unlikely to be any way to stop children from just taking one of their parents' licenses if they really want to bypass it, and the potential benefits of keeping children away from porn would be better delivered through a proper sex ed curriculum), but it's not that hard to figure out how it could be enforced.

streamofthesky posted...

Good.
Going forward no one can ever use the bs excuse, "I didn't know what I was getting into!" to beg for their student loans to be canceled.
It's already bs, but now the government can be like, "we literally gave you classes on how to not be a dumb ass with your finances".

I mean, student loans are still a matter of expecting 17-year-olds to make financial decisions that will affect them for the next 10+ years (which is probably longer than they've had control of their own money at that point), based on what they predict the job market will look like for their desired field in 4-5 years, along with the local cost of living and their best estimate of how well they expect to be able to do in their desired field (if they've even pinned down a concrete plan). That's a pretty complex analysis that a single high school class isn't going to be able to prepare such a young kid for (especially when so much of the messaging leading up to that point is "you need to go to college to be successful," though that's starting to change), to which end guidance counsellors (or possibly a separate, dedicated financial counsellor that works in tandem with the guidance counsellor) should really be walking students through the full financial picture in advising them on which colleges to apply for/choose. Expecting them to make sensible decisions alone isn't reasonable, nor can you even necessarily expect parents to help because modern costs are not comparable to what they would have experienced 20-30 years prior (which is very likely to bias their analyses in favour of believing college is more affordable than it is).

That, and the root cause of university costs being inflated to absolutely ridiculous levels needs to be addressed, since most of the problem goes away if prices are more reasonable. It's never going to be a small financial decision, but it doesn't have to be nearly as life-defining as it currently is.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Part of the class revolves around renting an apartment? "Ehh, doesn't apply to me, I'm planning on living at home."

I'm not sure that necessarily has to be an issue. Rent specifically may be hard to identify with, but rent is conceptually identical to every other monthly expense and the basic principle of "subtract that from your monthly income in figuring out how much disposable income you have" isn't terribly hard to grasp. Whether they plan on renting or not, pretty much everyone will eventually find themselves responsible for at least some of their finances, so it's at least possible to relate it to everyone in some capacity.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Balancing a checkbook? "Ehh, doesn't apply to me because I'm just going to use online banking/my parents administer my credit card account/etc."

You can still teach them how to track their finances using online banking. Old-fashioned chequebook balancing isn't really useful anymore, but exporting bank statements to Excel or whatever can be, and despite being literally three clicks for most banks, it's a surprisingly rare skill (to say nothing of Excel use in general, but that's another topic). That is a tricky lesson to deliver, though, since obviously you can't get them to go home and print out their own/their parents' bank statements to bring in as homework.

Saying this, though, online banking has mostly obviated the need for anyone to learn how to balance a chequebook. To that end, I don't think it's really the end of the world if people don't learn the skill.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If kids don't have a mental framework for what living alone is actually like, they won't internalize most of the lessons you try to teach in a finance class, and thus won't retain s***.

Yeah, it's not the easiest thing to contextualize. Then again, that's a challenge other subjects run into as well, so it's certainly not impossible.