He would have been 17 at Pearl Harbor. IIRC, the average age of a US soldier in WW2 was around 26. Either way, he was 75 in 1989, so his age when the US entered WW2 was 27, roughly matching the demographics.
Years back we rented a flat in a building that housed a lot of retired people.
A regulation we weren't aware of was that you weren't allowed to hang anything on the railings of your balcony.
On a day off we were cleaning and left a mat we'd washed to dry, hanging over the railing. It wasn't there an hour before we had a delegation at our door of angry elderly residents. They weren't one bit nice about it even after we immediately apologised, took down the offending item and explained that we were unaware of the regulation.
Later we got an apologetic call from our landlord who said he was ringing because he'd received a complaint about us.
I'm always curious what is it about old people that make some behave in this way? Is it the way people used to be raised, cognitive decline, or simple nothing better to do? I also notice it in the comment's section where older people tend to be far less forgiving of discretions than younger people.
It's not just old people. It's idle people. If you aren't focusing most of your attention on something outward in your life, you're going to hyper-focus inwardly and let tiny things eat at you all day.
The older you get the more the world changes around you, that rate of change is also increasing. Simultaneously your ability to adapt is diminishing.
It's easy to imagine elderly people clinging desperately to what little resistance to change they have power over. It's motivated by a mix of fear and spite for a world they no longer understand. They may not be able to prevent other races from moving in next door, but remove that mat from the handrail, and stay off the lawn!
I'm 40 and the older I get, the less patience I have. I see it for example with my love of Linux. Back in my 20s I loved to fiddle for hours to get things to work. Nowadays I dont have the patience for bullshit and spending time in small things.
I can only imagine how I'll be in another 40 years.
Old people are frail. The world appears frail to them. And as you age, the flaws of the world become more apparent, and the world appears even more like it is hanging on an edge.
Of course most people also have rosy glasses about their good old days, where people followed the law and things just worked.
So old people think adhering to rules and avoiding chaos is what kept everything from falling apart.
Also, as you get older, your routine becomes everything, as your neuroplasticity decreases and ability to deal with change. Rules keep things the same.
EDIT:
Also, one of my favorite explanations of popular vs nerd people in high school: popular kids spend all their free time being popular. Nerds work on school and other things.
In that vein, old people don't really have anything to do other than be nosy. They sleep less, are retired, and living off social security means "hanging around where you're at and not doing much".
> I'm always curious what is it about old people that make some behave in this way?
It should also be noted that you don't notice the nice old people who leave you alone because they're not in your face complaining. (A type of availability bias?)
Life was extremely rigid not that long ago. People knew their place and did not break the rules.
I am not sure if this is better or worse than my idiot downstairs neighbors that would party every weekend til 3am with zero regard for any of their neighbors. Then they are banging on the ceiling at 4pm on a Wednesday because we were moving furniture around for 15 minutes.
I disagree there was far less rigidness to life than today. People broke way more rules back then. Laws weren't taken as seriously. You could break many laws and cops would let you off the hook easily if you were nice. Now days life is very strict and there is zero room for error if you make a mistake. You can screw up once you won't get another chance in today's world. Especially with cancel culture.
Everyday the country is developing new useless laws to control people. Soon there will be only one set way to live and thats it because all laws and rules will be written.
I didn't necessarily think of those as rules, but I nevertheless solved the puzzle (until the end) without contradicting them. I only noticed maybe halfway to the solution that there is only one carrot, so obviously the rabbits have to pile up to solve it.
Seems to me a good comparison between inductive and deductive reasoning.
- with a simple logic puzzle like this, both are fairly comparable
- especially when some adults (me included) start with the wrong assumption, like two can't be in one node, which will slow down the process
Haha. Thanks for saying that internet stranger! Compared to me as well. It took me quite a bit longer to solve it too, even after i figured the rules.. so I guess kids are just good at adapting to the pretend-laws-world-problem-solving..
I haven't seen it (I think).
Looking at its entry on Rotten Tomatoes, it appears to be one of those films where the newer reviews tend to be more positive.
Why would there be newish reviews anyway unless it's a film that's still attracting significant attention?
Some of the better sci-fi movies aren't received well initially and take time to pick up a following. If they're lucky they go on to be 'sleeper hits' or 'cult classics'. Sure, re-releases help but a lot of it is there's a small group of people, like those commenting here, who remember a film/series and sing their praises long after the critics and mass audiences have forgotten about them.
Also, there are people like myself who are always scouring recommendations lists to see what we've overlooked. I find some very interesting movies that way.
Thanks. I feel myself that l am too influenced by critics. Years ago I used to go to Blockbuster and come away with random movies based on blurb on the back of the dvd case. Nowadays I'm wary of watching a movie unless it has a great score and lots of reviews on rotten tomatoes. I feel like i'm probably missing out on a lot of hidden gems.
The focus today is also on insulation ie preventing heat loss.
That means making houses less draughty.
But draughty houses are also healthy houses.
More fresh air and less mould.
I think it would be better if people accepted that in Winter
it's going to be colder indoors so wear thermal underwear etc.
Its called heat recovery ventillation, its the cheapest and most cost efficient improvement you can make to your life, house and energy bill.
You will have fresh air, control humidity and use 95% of the heat in your house air to heat incoming air from outside. It solves problems with mould and humidty. You can seal your house from the elments
A 'box' that does everything costs just 1 grand, just install ducting and you are done.
Making houses less draughty is just one point (convective heat transfer) another point is making walls conduct heat less to reduce conductive heat transfer.
Uninsulated houses often has higher risk to mold because of cold walls. Warmer air has a higher capacity to carry water as humidity. When it hits cold walls the air cools down and the water condensates leading to mold.
Drafty houses are not healthy houses: timber needs to be able to dry out to stay rot-and mold-free, but draftiness is associated with weakened immune systems and therefore poorer health. The draftiness rule only holds for older houses constructed before insulation, where the draftiness is needed to counteract the cool, stone/brick basement collecting moisture. A modern house design for insulation should be tight and mechanically ventilated, both for the maintenance of the structure and for human health.
It is possible to considerably improve the heat insulation of a building while still allowing turnover of fresh air. We don't specifically want to throw away the heat, we just want to change the air, and you can arrange to do that. The laws of thermodynamics forbid us from arranging to keep all the hotter molecules and lose the cool ones, but they allow us to insist on a roughly fair swap, hot air going out gets cooler, cold air coming in gets warmer.
This will be more expensive than just sealing everything up and hoping, but that's the sort of reason why you want somebody figuring out how to do it properly and only subsidising work that we know insulates homes without destroying ventilation so that they're horrible to live in. Modern homes here have much better heat insulation than when I was a kid, yet there isn't the damp problem I saw in cheaply retro-fitted rental places where I lived.
