This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/

There's a scene in Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" that illustrates practical necessity of reading comprehension for the average person, where a grandmother tells a mother to save enough money over time and make sure the granddaughter can read. An excerpt follows:

--

"Will it work, this saving?"

"I swear by the Holy Mother it will."

"Then why haven't you ever saved enough money to buy land?"

"I did. When we first landed, I had a star bank. It took me ten years to save that first fifty dollars. I took the money in my hand and went to a man in the neighborhood of whom it was said that he dealt fairly with people who bought land. He showed me a beautiful piece of earth and told me in my own language; 'This is thine!' He took my money and gave me a paper. I could not read. Later, I saw men building the house of another on my land. I showed them my paper. They laughed at me with pity in their eyes. It was that the land had not been the man's to sell. It was ... how do you say it in the English ... a schwindle."

"Swindle."

"Ai. People like us, known as greenhorns from the old country, were often robbed by men such as he because we could not read. But you have education. First you will read on the paper that the land is yours. Only then will you pay."

--

Yes, you can certainly be relatively more educated than you started by going to school, even if you are not literate by the end. But reading comprehension and literacy is a crucial skill that has practical value for living a better life.

I've seen a state where this is required by law, and I've seen a state where it wasn't. Very few people retained a lawyer when buying or selling land, in the latter.

I've bought property in both, and my state-required redistributional tax paid to a lawyer added zero to my confidence level. The extra middleman actually made me a tad more wary.

(I take your broader point, but reject the idea that lawyers are an especially useful element of a normal real estate transaction, for most people, at least in the US—I mean, on some level a lawyer drafted some form-documents and maybe some institution involved had a lawyer quickly glance at something at some point even in the rarely-using-lawyers state, but as a buyer or seller, directly interacting with a lawyer? IDK, maybe if you're involved in a FSBO transaction with no agents involved and also no financing)

So, people who are likely to be literate will seek out assistance when they realise they don't understand something? One might wonder if their literacy has anything to do with that...

People get taken advantage of all the time because they don’t understand what they’re signing—and society’s conditioned us to agree to whatever’s put in front of us, from cell phone contracts to software usage to major investments.

Plus, lawyers aren’t everywhere, and they’re not cheap. Most people can’t afford to just hire one whenever they need help.

I'm not sure I agree. Lawyers aren't rulers, only advisers. They can give you a perfect understanding of the situation, and if you are caught in a fear of missing out state, which was certainly the case for many leading up to that timeframe, it is likely you'll ignore their advice anyway.

In fact, many US states legally require lawyer advisory before completing a real estate transaction. Those states certainly did not avoid the real estate bubble.

> People get taken advantage of all the time because they don’t understand what they’re signing

Absolutely. Being able to comprehend every situation is straight up impossible. Not even the greatest minds of our time are able to do that. Not even lawyers themselves, whose job is to comprehend written text, are able to comprehend every situation. They focus on narrow specialities for good reason.

There is no avoiding that situation. If someone wants to take advantage of you, they'll find a way.

The convention was to never use the term "zero gravity," since using that term would perpetuate a common misunderstanding. Instead, we've used the term "microgravity" in its place—which makes sense, as there are still small gravitational forces acting on every object in space.

NASA also published a webpage with a good explanation of what microgravity is, with a nice diagram of how it works (including a visual of the parabolic flight): https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/for-kids-and-student...

From the article: “The way Vowles and technical director Pat Fry reportedly recounted it, Williams has been using a spreadsheet that grew to include some 20,000 parts used to make its cars. […] Not only was this system amateurish and unnavigable (making it unsuitable for the hectomillion-dollar sport that is F1), it was also desperately lacking in important logistical info. […] The team reportedly didn't have a central resource that tracked what parts cost, how long they took to make, or even how many they had or where they were stored. This forced production staff to search for parts whose location hadn't been documented, wasting valuable time.”

Though PostgreSQL or another database tool would be a better fit for complex datasets, I’m curious if Excel could still effectively be used for a database like this one.

I’ve known a couple people who use Excel a lot for their work, and they’d probably tell me that having over 20,000 rows of data isn’t necessarily unmanageable, if the implementation is well-designed.

I'm struggling to think of a top three list from audiobooks alone in terms of memorability and enjoyment, but I can list a few that had a measurable impact on my life.

1. "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami, narrated by Ray Porter (coincidentally, also the narrator for the Bobiverse book you mentioned). This was a major influence of increasing my running volume and moving on to a more intense intermediate middle-distance program, and his experiences also gave me the motivation to push through discomfort in running and certain parts of life when necessary (with the ideas that "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional," and that even world-class elite runners have days when they don't feel like training, but they go out and do so anyway).

2. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, narrated by Sissy Spacek. This reading wasn't required by my school growing up, but I've wanted to read this book for several years due to its great reputation. The audiobook version helped me finally enjoy the book over a month or so. I still remember Atticus Finch's quote that "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view [...] until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it," and the idea helped navigate through some complicated negotiations and social situations at various times.

3. Various other classics (sneaking a bit around the limit of a top three). The audiobook version of Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was an influence that led to an increased interest with space exploration and astronomy, and readings of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" helped me better appreciate the damaging effects of excessive escapism with entertainment, versus choosing efforts that require more struggle and difficulty.

I've also become more informed through listenings to Carreyrou's "Bad Blood" about the fall of Theranos, and Quinones's "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic," though classic literature has interestingly been typically more relevant to my day-to-day life than non-fiction books so far, with the exception of certain memoirs such as Murakami's.