I has going to add this to another thread, but couldn't track it down. So I guess I'll start a new one.

Yesterday I experienced what is probably the second- or third-most egregious example of innumeracy I've witnessed -- though there are so many that are quite egregious that it's hard to be firm about that.

I stopped at a fast food restaurant and placed an order that came to $14.08. Aside from driving home how expensive fast-food has become, so far so good.

I looked in my console and noticed that there was a $5 bill in there. Seeing an opportunity to exchange it for a $10 (instead of ending up with two $5 bills), I gave the cashier a $20, the $5, plus a nickel and three pennies. One thing I tend to due when I give coins to someone is check them to see if there are any that might be valuable, so in this case I know that I handed him one shiny penny with the shield on the back, one 1981 penny, and one penny that had seen much better days.

I was prepared for and expecting him to give me back the $5, but he entered something into the cash register and then handed me back the $20 bill instead. Then he proceeded to give me $1.73 in change and told me that he still owed me a penny -- despite giving me back three different pennies that the ones I had given him (i.e., he still had at least three pennies available to him). I told him that that was okay.

At first, I wondered if he was looking at the wrong order, but he proceeded to give me the correct order (and it was actually correct, which was somewhat of a surprise in and of itself).

I have no idea how he arrived at his actions. I ended up paying just $3.35 (would have been $3.34 had I insisted on the final penny he claimed he owed me).

Normally, I would take this as an opportunity to point out the really bad math and numeracy involved and make sure that I paid the correct amount before I left. But this is becoming so common that I've finally decided that the best thing I can do to try to put some feedback into the system is to stop saving the cashier's behind and let their drawer end up short so that their employer is aware that their buffoon employees are costing them money. If it gets bad enough, employers will (hopefully) try to take some measure to address it. Historically, of course, they've looked for technology to come to the rescue and that has actually just fueled the decline. But, perhaps, at some point they may actually start trying to hire people that aren't completely innumerate and/or train them to properly handle money, since clearly all of the technological tools at their disposal are insufficient. Frankly, I don't hold out any realistic hope that this will happen.

In the past thirty years I have run across one cashier at a store that handled money properly. When I commented on it, she said that the owner of the store, who was in her 70's, insisted that all of her employees learn to do so and practice it. She also said that, at first, she thought it was useless and she only did it to humor the old lady and because she was afraid she would get fired if she didn't. But she said that, right from the first day, her draw was almost always exactly correct, something that had never happened any place else she had worked -- that if the drawer came out within $5, the manager's usually didn't make a fuss.

 

The decline set in when cash registers started to calculate the change. Before then, change was given by the "counting up" method - counting up from the amount charged to the amount tendered. I learned it at an early age in pounds-shillings-pence.

 

I'm almost sure if you could control the cash register display, many employees would just give you back whatever it displayed without a thought in the world.

I remember one time when I purchased something around $15, I paid with a $20 bill. The cashier hit $50 instead of $20, and could not be convinced just to give me the $5-some I was due, and ignore the display that said $35-some.

"If I do that, my til won't balance and I'll get in trouble. I need to get my manager!"

 

But, perhaps, at some point they may actually start trying to hire people that aren't completely innumerate and/or train them to properly handle money, since clearly all of the technological tools at their disposal are insufficient.

No. They'll just stop accepting cash once everyone is accustomed to paying electronically.

(And, it's easier to beg for tips!)

 

The decline set in when cash registers started to calculate the change. Before then, change was given by the "counting up" method - counting up from the amount charged to the amount tendered. I learned it at an early age in pounds-shillings-pence.

It's actually been an incremental progression -- what I call the Cash Register Syndrome -- but it applies to most areas where technology has relieved humans of the need for competency.

When I was a young boy, very few stores had any kind of cash register. Big stores like Safeway did, but even those were little more than motorized versions of the old hand-crank adding machines that had been around for some time and which could really only add numbers. The cashier had to look at the price tag on the item, enter it correctly (on a sea of buttons), then look up the tax on a tax chart (which worked roughly like the old trig/log tables), add that in to get the final total, then take the money from the customer and count the change back.

Most stores, particularly small mom-and-pop stores, still required the cashier to write the prices on a receipt book and add them up mentally. Everything else was the same. This is how cashiering had been done for centuries and, given that a very large fraction of kids in school were going to need those skills in the work place, schools emphasized them and most students were very proficient at them. Above and beyond the arithmetic skills, children were taught a variety of cross-check skills, such as throwing out nines, and estimation skills to establish a solid foundation of numeracy (though I doubt that term had been coined yet, as I think it is an invention of the post-WWII era).

But, as will always be the case, there will be some fraction of people that can't perform at the required level of proficiency, so along comes technology to the rescue. First with the purely mechanical adding machines that appeared toward the end of the 1800s (there were, of course, other tools to aid in computation throughout the ages, but most had no impact on education as they were only used by a very small number of people) and their motorized descendants in use with large retailers in the 1970s time frame. Again, these had very limited impact on education because they were the exception rather than the norm. There were some adding machines that were priced such that some smaller stores and even individuals could afford them, but they were still pretty rarely utilized.

But, at about this time, electronic calculators that could automatically calculate the tax (because it was a fixed rate that applied to every item purchased) were feasible to address the biggest problem among cashiers, which was incorrectly calculating the tax due. However, at the same time, the cost of these calculators, though too high for most individuals, also started to fall within reach of most small stores and so they gained rapid and widespread use. Schools naturally responded since, quite arguably, one of their primary goals is to equip students with what they need to succeed in the world, which means that they are constantly looking for things that are no longer needed (or at least perceived to be that way) so that they can replace them with new things that are (or are at least perceived to be). So schools reduced the emphasis on practical numeracy -- less emphasis on building solid arithmetic proficiency and the quick abandonment of teaching estimation and cross-checking techniques. This leads to a general lowering of the arithmetic proficiency across the board to match the lower proficiency required by the widely-used cash-registers (that, at this point, can add numbers manually entered and calculate the tax at the end).

But, as always, there are those that can't quite perform even at the lowered requirements, so along comes technology to the rescue as we address the issue of cashiers not being able to count change back accurately (will give them cash registers that allow them to enter the amount that they are given and will tell them how much change to give back), then the issue of cashiers not being able to accurately enter prices (give them cash registers that let them scan the barcode on the item), then the inability to count back the change even after the cash register tells them how much to give back (give them cash registers that dispense the coins so that they only have to give back the bills).

At each step, the skill needed to successfully work the next iteration of cash registers goes down, while the knowledge and skill needed to design it goes up. But the educational system is focused on the skills needed to work it, since that is what the vast majority of students are more likely to be doing, which means that the mean educational level goes down and the students that gain the knowledge and skills to design the next generation of cash registers are pinched into an ever smaller tail of the distribution. The logical conclusion of this is that, eventually, we will live in a world in which most toddlers can work the latest cash register (probably by just thinking something via the AI neural interface), but there's only one person in the world that knows how it works. When that person dies, civilization collapses.

Now, while admittedly very tongue-in-cheek, consider the recent CrowdStrike fiasco in which major systems around the globe were crippled because some aspect of a technology that everyone has become ultra-dependent on, but that only a small handful of people understand, hiccupped, and few people had the ability to even attempt to function without it.

Also, I don't think that cash registers calculating change were the actual cause, but rather a reflection. I think the actual cause, inasmuch as you can possibly pinpoint a single cause, was the introduction of calculators into the classroom in a way that was very poorly thought out and, in the end, irresponsible and destructive. I went and did a bit of research on this a couple decades ago, so I'm sure I'm going to mess up some of the details, but first I'll describe what brought it to my attention and then what I found out years later when the Internet was around to help me do some searches.

When I was a senior undergraduate (1991), I was taking a microcontroller course and we were given an in-class assignment to write an assembly language routine to do 32-bit multiplication and division on this microcontroller that could only due 8-bit multiplication and division. So I pulled out a piece of paper and considered how I did the bookkeeping to multiply and divide four-digit numbers under the constraint that I could only actually multiply and divide single-digit numbers at a time. Very straightforward to go from there to writing the program to do the 32-bit operations. When I had finished, the instructor asked the handful of people that had gotten it to circulate around and help out the people that were struggling with it. I observed two things very quickly -- first, the people that were struggling didn't know how to multiply multi-digit numbers by hand and hand no clue how to do long division. Second, every one of the handful of "non-traditional" students (meaning students that hadn't come straight out of high school) had no problem with the assignment, while very few of the traditional students did. I was barely non-traditional, as I had had to take a three-year break in order to serve an involuntary call to active duty my sophomore year, plus an additional year delay because I worked a couple of cooperative education jobs as a junior and senior.

Over the next few years, as I working as a graduate TA, I saw obvious decline in math skills each year and the other faculty I talked to were seeing the same thing. Every year I had to make significant simplifications to the labs that the students the prior year had no problems with. This puzzled me for years, until I was in a position to start doing some digging online. What I discovered, and which dovetailed pretty much perfectly with my observations, was that in the mid-1970s there was a wholesale and national push to adopt "technology in the classroom", enabled by the availability of four-function calculators at a price point where most parents and/or schools could now afford them. So calculator usage was taught starting in first grade and students went through their entire K-12 experience using them. At first, they were still taught things like number bases and trig and log tables, as well as long multiplication and division, but they were treated as topics-of-the-week, so students were only exposed to them, but not expected to gain and actual proficiency with them beyond what was needed for the next exam.

Most educational shifts happen slowly, as different schools jump on a new bandwagon at different rates, usually over a time span of a decade or more. But this shift, which was driven by calculators reaching this price point almost overnight and thereby enabling a pent-up desire and dream of many in the educational field (namely incorporating tomorrow's technology into today's classroom -- I still remember that being a buzz phrase back then) that had been sitting on the shelf because the costs were too high. So, over a span of just a few years, we went from practically no students going through K-12 with a reliance on calculators, to a very large fraction of them doing so.

I was, but by happenstance, one of the lucky ones in which the transition was done more-or-less ideally. I was a couple years before the calculators-in-first-grade bandwagon got rolling, so I went through a traditional math education that didn't allow calculators at all (in math classes). But by the time I got to high school, scientific calculators had gotten cheap enough that we were allowed/expected to use them in the chemistry and physics courses. So the math courses still built the strong foundational skills, while the science courses let us leverage technology to do much more realistic and extensive explorations, but at the same time knowing how to do it, if we had to, with nothing but pen and paper and some trig/log tables.

The one thing I missed out on in school was the use of slide rules -- the class before me was the last one to use them. But I got that later, as a pilot, since the notorious E6B Flight Computer is little more than a circular slide rule.

 

No. They'll just stop accepting cash once everyone is accustomed to paying electronically.

(And, it's easier to beg for tips!)

Agree -- this is definitely the current trend. When we were in Australia last month we ended up scrambling to spend the Australian currency we had gotten (we didn't want to get bit a second time on the exchange scam), because so few places would accept cash down there. I haven't seen that taking off here, yet, but I'm expecting it to.

While I freely acknowledge the convenience (and a few other benefits) of using credit cards or other cashless options, it has the completely foreseeable effect of encouraging/enabling people to spend way more than they think they are, both on individual sales and cumulatively.

Part of me is tempted to go back to the days when I wrote a check for absolutely anything I paid for -- no cash, no credit cards. I enjoyed absolute rock-steady control over my finances. Today, of course, that's not even an option. Many places will not accept checks and, as noted, we can expect places to no accept cash in the near future. I also expect more places to not even accept credit/debit cards, but instead only accept some form of online payments (which I refuse to take part in at all, at least until I have no choice in the matter).

 

No. They'll just stop accepting cash once everyone is accustomed to paying electronically.

I think that the Crowdstrike debacle has made some people think again about that.

 

I can still remember going to the grocery store and while waiting in line to check out seeing the elderly woman in front of us hand the cashier her small money purse. The cashier removed what was due from the purse and returned it to her. Not a word was exchanged between them as this was apparently a common occurrence. It then dawned on me that the elderly woman was not only illiterate but also unable to even count...

 

I think that the Crowdstrike debacle has made some people think again about that.

If people were that smart, they'd have stopped using windows decades ago.

 

If people were that smart, they'd have stopped using windows decades ago.

So, are Linux systems are immune to a third-party pushing a bad update?

 

So, are Linux systems are immune to a third-party pushing a bad update?

At the kernel level, to the best of my knowledge, assuming one does not use proprietary drivers (generally the default for most distributions).

This is a weakness that has been perpetuated by proprietary video drivers (i.e nvidea/AMD). I don't use them, and would not use them on a mission-critical system.

 

At the kernel level, to the best of my knowledge, assuming one does not use proprietary drivers (generally the default for most distributions).

This is a weakness that has been perpetuated by proprietary video drivers (i.e nvidea/AMD). I don't use them, and would not use them on a mission-critical system.

So I guess the following are fake news?

https://www.neowin.net/news/crowdstrike-broke-debian-and-rocky-linux-months-ago-but-no-one-noticed/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_restoration_tools/

 

I can still remember going to the grocery store and while waiting in line to check out seeing the elderly woman in front of us hand the cashier her small money purse. The cashier removed what was due from the purse and returned it to her. Not a word was exchanged between them as this was apparently a common occurrence. It then dawned on me that the elderly woman was not only illiterate but also unable to even count...

you're the only pope in this forum,the rest of accounts are cops :--p
maybe should redefine your P2C ratio (# of popes/# of cops) to get things within less prices :--"

 

At the kernel level, to the best of my knowledge, assuming one does not use proprietary drivers (generally the default for most distributions).

This is a weakness that has been perpetuated by proprietary video drivers (i.e nvidea/AMD). I don't use them, and would not use them on a mission-critical system.

and even god doesn't know what is getting ready for the next time, besides :--B

 

So I guess the following are fake news?

https://www.neowin.net/news/crowdstrike-broke-debian-and-rocky-linux-months-ago-but-no-one-noticed/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_restoration_tools/

There are consequences for allowing propriety code into your FOSS kernel, as I indicated above.

The report you noted has nothing to do with either Debian or Rocky, but with some org that decided to allow CrowdStrike binaries to run in kernel mode.

This has been a known recipe for disaster for eons.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

 

There are consequences for allowing propriety code into your FOSS kernel, as I indicated above.

The report you noted has nothing to do with either Debian or Rocky, but with some org that decided to allow CrowdStrike binaries to run in kernel mode.

This has been a known recipe for disaster for eons.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

In other words, switching to Linux from Windows is immaterial for this issue, since both are susceptible to the same thing -- letting third-party software run with full privileges.

 

In other words, switching to Linux from Windows is immaterial for this issue, since both are susceptible to the same thing -- letting third-party software run with full privileges.

It is impossible to run Windows in the absence of proprietary kernel code.

It is possible -- actually preferable and usually by default -- to run Linux as FOSS kernel only.

There's a reason linux kernels with proprietary blobs are marked "tainted".

IMHO, CrowdStrike under Linux is lazy sysadmining.

 

It's the EU's fault. I guess MS gets a pass this time.