• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • 13 words per minute isn’t impressive

    Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)

    On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.

    That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.






  • worried about “eroding our democratic system”

    Something a Trump presidency has proven to do wonders for and something that Trump has espoused a deep desire to protect.

    Democracy itself is on the line. The man Stein is working to get into office incited a violent coup attempt on the US Congress, tried to steal the election in multiple ways, eroded institutions and norms left and right, and has expressed that he wants to make sure people never have to vote again which is entirely possible if he’s given another four years inside the Oval Office. I’m defending it because I actually understand what’s at stake here and that politics isn’t a stupid game. People in the US will die. People in Gaza will die. People in Ukraine will die. People’s lives – especially those of the poor, the middle class, and ethnic and sexual minorities – will be ruined. The US will take decades to recover if it ever even starts recovering at all.