I routinely flew for business before 9/11 and would typically show up about 15 minutes before boarding time at one of the three busiest airports in the US and typically got through security and would then had to wait 5-7 minutes before boarding would start. Air travel is radically different than it was pre-9/11.

While certain strains of fundamentalism have literalist tendencies, there is nothing implicit literalist in fundamentalism. Some might look at the Five Fundamentals [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...] and consider them implicitly literalist, but most of them are contained in the creeds and confessions that Catholicism and Protestantism hold together and so denying any of them would place one outside of either Catholic or Protestant doctrine.

Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.

That said, I did my undergrad at MIT about 25 yrs ago. I met my best friends there who, along with a lot of other students there, expanded my horizons in terms of ambition and possibilities in a good way. 20 years later, having MIT on my resume (along with a track record of solid tech work) still gets me a pretty incredible hit rate on job applications. I was offered a decent amount of financial aid but still came out with ~$80k in student loan debt which was a lot 25 years ago. Even in the early 2000s, I was able to pay that off pretty easily. I think that in the case of many career choices, the cost of a degree from an elite university is not worth it, but in the case of tech, I think the MIT degree is clearly worth it.

The one minor proviso I would add since you mentioned graduate work is that doing doctoral work at MIT is typically more difficult if you've done your undergrad there. On the other hand, doing an M.Eng. at MIT is quite easy if you have reasonable grades. The one-year M.Eng. _might_ be worth the extra year, but outside of narrow specialties, the opportunity cost of doctoral work relative to 3-5 years building experience and earning money in tech tends to favor the latter.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30305631

Points: 8

# Comments: 5

The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."

Given that Amazon announced the fork in January and they don't expect it to be production-ready until summer, I'm guessing they've underestimated the amount of work required to package and distribute a product as complex as Elasticsearch. Given that, I doubt they will be well-equipped to keep pace with new feature development.

We all understand this when we use modern language such as "sunrise" which is not literally true (the sun does not actually "rise" in the sky though it appears that way to the casual observer) even though we're educated enough to understand basic astronomical phenomena such as the rotation of the earth giving rise to daytime and nighttime.

A Biblical literalist who takes figurative language in the Bible literally would end up making the same mistake that someone taking "sunrise" literally would. This is not at all an attempt to classify as figurative language all controversial or supernatural claims of the Bible (its claim that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead is clearly supernatural and impossible to classify as figurative), but so many of the lists of contradictory claims in the Bible rely on wooden interpretations of what is pretty clearly figurative language.

Also, James, while prominent in the early church, was not in any sense Jesus's choice to lead the church. The closest thing to a single designated leader of the church was Peter though that is a point of contention between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Nowhere are circumcision or kosher foods required for Christianity, either.

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