Peanut butter is one of the cheapest shelf stable foods, either per calorie or per gram of protein. It's obviously delicious with some sort of fruit jelly/jam. And the protein in peanuts complements the protein in bread, covers all the essential amino acids.

Spreadable or meltable cheeses are pretty delicious on toast, and can be supplemented with seasonings. I put cream cheese and everything bagel seasoning on my sourdough slices most mornings.

There are also a ton of delicious toppings for open face "sandwiches" or toast:

1. Avocado is a classic for a reason. If avocados are cheap near you, that can be an option.
2. Fresh tomatoes on toast are a classic in Spain for a reason, too.
3. Sardines or other canned fish/seafood, if you like that.
4. Mediterranean spreads like hummus, baba ganoush, muhammara, harissa, etc.
5. Shrimp, like gambas al ajillo or something similar, go really well on toast.
6. Roasted mushrooms

If you're baking your own bread, you can also try to shape some little bread bowls and fill them with soup. French onion soup takes some time but the ingredients are pretty cheap.

Not all of these options are ultra cheap, but many are flavorful enough that even small portions can work out to be really affordable on a per calorie basis, for stretching that budget with bread.

There are two types of people in the world:

1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

Yeah, it's a mixing of art styles.

The road, yacht, and bushes all choose not to put very much detail, but the actual cars are all essentially flattened photographs with perfect perspective and angles and shadows.

Not saying that level of accurate detail isn't possible with hand-drawn comics (see pbfcomics for an artist who is simply amazing at choosing the level of detail appropriate for the joke) but the subtle mismatch just looks wrong at first glance.

Then, the inaccurate details in the exact same comic. It doesn't seem like one coherent work with one author.

Wasn't there a guy who would actively remove artist signatures from comics because he considered it "advertising"?

If A causes B, and you see B, it's a logical fallacy to presume that the B you observe was caused by A. That's the core of what I'm discussing here: pointing out that B is caused by more than just A, and that A itself isn't as common as you seem to suggest, so your Bayesian inference of how much B is caused by A is weighted all wrong.

You came in, excited to share with the world about the reading debates, and then making the mistake of overassigning that cause to every effect you see. I'm pointing out the errors in your reasoning.

I'm not discouraging you from being excited about the topic. It's important. I already agree with you. I also don't need hours of podcast audio to summarize what I already know from extensive reading on the topic, over literal decades. I'm not arguing with you about the history or the science.

I am, however, asking you to, like, actually read and understand what I'm saying. You've leapt to an unsupported conclusion (the illiterate people I encounter are illiterate because they weren't taught phonics) based on a bad reasoning from a correct premise that I agree with (phonics instruction is the best method of teaching literacy, and too many educators went down the wrong path in the past). And separately, you seem to be under the misconception that people born in 2000 suffer from this problem worse than people born in 1980 or 1960. That's been my consistent position this entire thread.

Alcohol definitely interferes with all sorts of stuff, I'm not disputing that. The body prioritizes getting rid of circulating alcohol.

But if you look at the way the body metabolizes alcohol, using alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzymes to convert to acetaldehyde, and aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) enzymes to convert to acetate, the process accumulates acetate in the body. And acetate is metabolized in the Krebs cycle.

I don't know what experiment you're referring to, but the metabolic pathway that ethanol follows, to acetate, is pretty well established. And that pathway accounts for how the body gets rid of something like 98% of the alcohol it consumes.

As the body gets rid of that poison, it consumes oxygen and releases carbon dioxide, generating energy stored in ATP molecules.

Alcohol has calories. This is basic textbook nutritional science.

No, I'm saying that what you're talking about doesn't actually link cause and effect. Curriculum selection is a small part of the educational challenges in this country (and in other countries), and many students come up short for all sorts of different reasons, from family/home issues, nutrition, poverty, truancy and attendance, instructional quality (regardless of what written curriculum the instructor should be teaching), etc.

Meanwhile, some excellent students can thrive no matter what they're given. It's not like the kids attending the whole language schools grew up with like 0% literacy rates.

So there are kids that were gonna learn to read well under either paradigm. And some that were gonna be bad readers under either.

To pin the broad swath of reading issues on this narrow slice of curriculum design is overstating the effects of curriculum. That's what my original comment was getting at, and still what I believe. More details about curricula don't actually address my non-curriculum points: that you can't just argue with an idiot on the internet and conclude that the reason for his idiocy is because he must've been taught with the three cueing method. That's too much of an inferential leap.

I'm aware of this debate and the history, and cheered the reintroduction of mandating phonics instruction to New York Public Schools, one of the last holdouts in the country.

So yes, I agree: research and common sense show that phonics-based instruction is a more effective way of teaching children how to read, compared to the long-discredited whole language movement.

But I take issues with two ideas in your post: first, that this is an issue that affects a lot of people, and second, that this affects younger generations more than older generations.

To the first point, I'm arguing that most people eventually learn how to read, regardless of what the formal district or state level curriculum says to use. Some combination of parents and caretakers and external learning materials (children's books, children's television, apps and toys, tutoring, external programs like the very popular hooked on phonics) are teaching them outside of school. Lots of teachers are giving individualized instruction and getting people past the hump, even if the district or state curriculum says to do things a particular way. Many kids enrolled in non-phonics curricula still get plenty of exposure to phonics instruction. New York being slowest to return to phonics contributed to this perception, in that New York's (and Columbia University's) outsized media/cultural influence led this conversation to be had decades after it was already settled in most of the rest of the English-speaking world.

For the second point, your post makes it sound like this is something that young people today are encountering for the first time. No, these ideas stem from a centuries-old debate with non-phonics instruction peaking basically during my own childhood in the 80's. The backlash against whole language was going strong in the 90's, and culminated in the federal Department of Education coming down hard on the side of phonics during the GWB presidency. Most of the state and local educational systems got on board by then, too. And maybe the boomers that got the most concentrated version of Whole Language grew up to be slightly less literate than other generations. But whatever it is, there are so many other things affecting them today, too, to where "how they were taught to read in 1960" isn't going to be a factor distinguishable from plain old noise.

I just read the underlying survey results from the linked source in the footnotes. Which are from a 2020 study, not a 2010 study, but I'll leave it to someone else to fix the Wikipedia page, as my VPN address is blocked from editing Wikipedia.

22% of instructors teach systematic phonics as their method of instruction. 4% use whole language, the system that discourages phonics emphasis. 68% use balanced literacy. And of those, when asked to give their own written definition, more than half (52%) explicitly mention phonics as part of it, literally the plurality answer in what the phrase "balanced literacy" means. 21% mention "phonemic awareness." 14% mention "all five essential components of reading instruction," which comes from a National Reading Panel definition that includes phonics and phonemic awareness as 2 of the 5.

The study report itself explicitly disclaims trying to draw too strong of a conclusion that teachers aren't using phonics just because they didn't use the word in their definition. And other keywords like "whole language" only got 6%.

But we don't need to try to infer what percentage, because the study itself explicitly surveyed the importance of phonics. For the question "When you're teaching students to read, how much emphasis do you place on phonics?," 70% answered "a lot," 28% answered "some," 2% answered "a little," and 0% answered "none."

The study itself pretty strongly supports the idea that almost everyone in the US is teaching phonics as the foundation of reading for 5-7 year olds.

There's some truth to that, but it's also important that phonics lay down the foundation for reading, and let young readers identify the complexities behind the rules, and then internalize the meta-rules governing which rules apply where.

It's frustrating that tough doesn't rhyme with though or through or bough (or that none of those others rhyme with each other). Or that many homographs aren't homophones, to where you need to rely on context to know which pronunciation or meaning applies to words like "read," "lead," or "unionized."

Still, how else are you gonna do it? Lay down the basics, then layer on some exceptions that generally come in as loanwords (entree) or proper nouns (Xi Jinping), but always building on a foundation where new words can be encountered and pronounced. We can read and pronounce newly invented words easily, whether it's slang like "mogging" or fanciful corporate trademarks like "Reddit." We can deal with the exceptions as they come up.

Common core math is how high performers in math tend to already approach math concepts. The controversial examples focused on "number sense" do instill good habits and instincts for error correction (especially important in the age of calculators and computers), and don't detract from the importance of the actual mathematical operations. Either way, common core math curriculum as a whole is good, and continues to be a good set of goals for learning math. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that the math standards are too high and leave some kids behind, but that's less a problem with the standard and more a problem with our ability to get kids up to that perfectly reasonable standard, of what we should hope that all adults should know.

The main criticisms of common core that I sympathize with are that they deemphasize the humanities too much, but that's not exactly a problem with the math standards themselves.

I think you're overstating the effect of this method of instruction, which mostly affected much older people.

It was popular between 1960 and 1980, and waned after that. Whole word and three cueing was never as popular as phonics, and even when used, was mostly used in conjunction with phonics.

This Wikipedia article collects quite a bit of history across multiple countries.

By the 1990's, pretty much every American school system was back to phonics as a foundation. And by 2020, there were pretty much no American schools discouraging phonics instruction and the foundation for teaching reading.