the internet is in my bra!

I was thinking recently of trying to add gluten back into my diet because of how much I miss croissants.  But then I started making a list of the benefits and possible costs. In the plus column: chocolate croissants. Eating out with friends sans excessive planning. Not having a thing that I have to always be paranoid about.

Unchanged: get cysts either way.

Negatives: the return of migraines. The immune system of fail. Higher cancer risk. Become anemic again and have low blood pressure issues.
Ive been sick twice this year instead of the usual once a month. My immune system works better this way. And I miss croissants, but its not worth my health to have them even if there is not a passable substitute.

It bothers me to know that there will always be things I want and cant have, but then I forget to be annoyed until the next time it becomes an issue. How sad is that?

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life skill list

I got up too late today to go to garage sales looking for old button boxes, so instead I'll just rant about something that our education system needs: a class in life skills. There are a lot of policy reasons why it will be hard to do this, and i understand that teachers mostly will not want to give students information that will undermine their own control of a class (and destroy politician's credibility). But reading, writing and arithmetic are not the only skills that young adults in the modern world need. There's too much information to sift through, and too much advertising that warps our culture's perceptions of what is needful that ensure that even people who can read don't and the ones who do don't know what to read that will help them.

how to learn/how to teach
how to apologize and be taken seriously when speaking about emotions
how to systematize information
the concept of due diligence and how to apply it to your life
the concept of confirmation bias and how to look out for it
how to deconstruct propaganda and spot exploitation
how to spot logical fallacies
how the economy works at an individual level
game theory and how to create win/win situations
how to navigate the power structures of organizations and understand their relative responsibilities
how to troubleshoot a PC
how to think through long-term consequences
How to avoid normative thinking (this is going to be a whole other post)

If there were books that snuck these concepts into the literature and could be taught at the high school level, that would solve a lot.

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