I'm a serial startup founder and a SaaS and ecommerce pioneer. I've launched a series of successful startups and had a stint as head of Web Applications at Red Hat. Publisher of OSNews.com. I'm currently working at proptech firm Equiem.
This kind of thing is solvable. When I built my house in Park City, Utah, I discovered that the growth in the area is projected to overwhelm the municipal sewer system in the coming decade. So I had to pay an impact fee of $3,000 per bathroom in order to get my building permit. I happily paid $15K, knowing that the money will go to the budget of a new treatment plant. There are very few places where there's actually no water. It's mostly a question of the infrastructure being available (enough storage, for example).
I lived in Park City for a decade, and it's the same. If you live your life being mad at the traffic during the Sundance Festival and Christmas vacation skiiers, you're just an old man yelling at clouds. That tourist money pays for so many of the amenities that make our town a nice place to live during the rest of the year. Lighten up!
I don't think that what this article is describing is similar at all to Eastern Europe-style public housing. The US also had a big experiment in public housing in the 20th century, that also had a lot of bad results.
Speaking as a payments industry insider, it's surprising to me, but PayPal payments represent a huge proportion of online payments, and they're on an uptick. I'm not sure why.
I mostly use PayPal when there's some kind of promotion that gives me an incentive, such as extra credit card rewards, or a cash back offer. I think a lot of people find it convenient to use PayPal for ecommerce because they don't have to get their credit card out, just enter their PayPal password.
The production values of this Soviet Lord of the Rings strike me as quite similar to I, Claudius. And it's worth noting that the televised low-budget stage play production values of I, Claudius notwithstanding, it's one of the best television shows ever made.
I had the exact same thought: #1 I use Google Flights all the time. Daily, sometimes. #2 Google Flights and Travelocity aren't comparable in their utility.
I registered .com domains with my kids' names when they were born, and when one of them discovered that they could get the email address gmail@hisname.com he was stoked. His friends don't understand how it's possible for that email address to work. As a practical joke, he always says "what do you mean? Doesn't gmail@yourname.com not work too?"
The trick is that we all have thousands of ancestors, and if you luck upon one thread that connects you to the aristocracy, their genealogical records are more complete than common people. That's why, after a few generations, people only know the really fancy people they're descended from.
It's hard to believe now how common it was for children to die in infancy before modern medicine. Parents didn't love their kids any less, though, so it was a source of great pain. As the article points out, "memento mori" stuff was a way to inoculate yourself emotionally for the inevitable incidence of one of your small children dying.
That's only good for early birds, because you end up with it being light for hours before most people are awake (during the summer). If you keep DST in place permanently, sundown happens later, and you eliminate the need for an extra hour of lighting every evening, which presumably saves electricity.
That was by design: From the wikipedia page: The monks that built it were "considered the strictest of the monastic orders, they laid down requirements for the construction of their abbeys, stipulating that "none of our houses is to be built in cities, in castles or villages; but in places remote from the conversation of men."
It's funny that this showed up at HN, but I'm personally interested because one of my ancestors, Aoife MacMurrough, was buried at Tintern Abbey. Her daughter and son-in-law, Isabel de Clare and William Marshal, were big time patrons of the abbey. If you're ever in Eastern Wales, the ruins are a pretty spot to visit.
It's posited that Howard Hughes' increasingly strange behavior and eventual withdrawal into reclusion was precipitated by a series of TBIs he suffered in test pilot crashes.
When I was an English major we studied a bunch of commercial products, and we had to buy them from huge corporations. Sometimes the authors of those products were alive enough to actually receive a royalty, sometimes not.
You're right about this. In more adversarial cases it's probably best to tell the police that you will talk to them, but only in a formal interview with your lawyer present (even if this isn't true, and you don't want to talk to them, and you don't have a lawyer and don't intend to get one). Telling them this, though, doesn't give them as much license to get nasty.
That's true. The cops would have to coordinate with the DA to make that happen. Which they would never bother to do unless they really needed your testimony, which is why it's a good way to get them to buzz off.
This is a good suggestion. If I've already gone to the trouble to make a machine-readable resume, it would be nice to at least seed my CV with the data from that file.
Interestingly, waterproof fabric-based tape was originally called "duck tape" (for its waterproof quality). The same kind of tape was later also called duct tape, but it's actually pretty terrible for ducts. You want to use the all-aluminum tape for ducts. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/52151/it-duck-tape-or-du...
There's a trail I like to ride on in Utah that's an old railroad grade. It's part of the Great Western Trail now, but is not heavily traveled by hikers. I've never seen a single other hiker or biker on the trail. It's overgrown now, and has narrowed down to a singletrack trail. But it's easy to ride on, even without a fancy full suspension bike, because over 100 years ago, it was graded for a railroad, so it's a gentle slope, and all of the big boulders were removed. Even though it's been derelict for a century, it's still gentle sloped and mostly free of big rocks. Most of it is overgrown with shrubs, but the occasional hiker is enough to keep a footpath clear. It could be ridden even with a city commuter bike along most of it.
In a post-apocalyptic world, bicycles would definitely be a great way to get around. The roads would get cracked and overgrown, but with moderate traffic, they'd develop into smooth single track trails. What to do once you run out of tires and tubes would be the bigger problem.
For some reason, the history page on the Pinkerton website has a big hole in it between 1907 and 1962. What could they have been up to in the early 20th Century, I wonder?
https://pinkerton.com/our-story/history
My guess is that these elephants weren't actually domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than raised in captivity.