DavidAdams

The anxiety from the film is very close to Europe's anxiety, I think. In the story, England is relatively stable and prosperous in a world full of chaos, but there's a sense that if refugees were allowed in, the stability would be upended and the limited resources of the country would be unable to support the onslaught. Sure, in the world of the film, the English are trying to enjoy the last decades of human existence while clinging to their privilege, whereas in real-world Europe there's a feeling they'll be demographically out-competed by immigrants. Without the pressure from low fertility among natives, European countries wouldn't feel so threatened by immigration.

Ironically, of course, the only workable solution to the demographic crises in Europe and Japan is immigration. Otherwise, pension responsibilities will overwhelm the working-age population and the whole society will collapse.

If it convinced any Amazon customers to buy a Roku instead of an AppleTV, then it was most definitely good for the customer [rimshot].

I think the point of the essay was that the affect that some modern readers interpret as arrogance or even phoniness was actually a sly humor. If you see his work as a prescriptive how-to, you'll see his writing one way, but if you see it as winking, wry social commentary you'll read it another.

That's not to say that this essayist's point of view is "correct," but I found it to be an enlightening point of view.

Because journalists and academics have a longstanding tradition of disclosing potential conflicts of interest, and therefore readers and scholars expect it. To do otherwise displays at best amateurism and at worst a deliberate attempt to hide bias.

Americans have a reputation for saying things like "let's do lunch sometime" as a sort of vague statement of agreeableness and intention to stay in contact, whereas, let's say, Swedish people would consider that to be a straightforward intention to book a lunch date.

I did this exact same thing as a teenager when our creek turned into a torrent, but because I had thoroughly explored the forest as a free-range kid, I knew where the creek would take us, so we arranged to have someone meet us at a faraway bridge with a car.

The article glosses over the interesting rationale behind the dazzle camouflage on ships. It's not intended, as the article suggests, to make ships at sea harder to see. That's not really possible since they make a distinct bump on a flat horizon, but the wild paint jobs make it harder for sailors looking through binoculars or scopes to make out the type of ship, its size, or its true heading by breaking up the lines.

There isn't that much evidence that dazzle camouflage worked all that well, but there'e an interesting hypothesis that cubism, an art movement that was ascendant in the early 20th century, was an influence on the technique. And it looks like dazzle camouflage feel out of favor at the same time cubism did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

There's a great 99% invisible podcast on the topic: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-65-razzle-dazz...

It bugged me too. I don't recall ever having heard that particular word innovation before, so I think it's just a made up variant.

This is a good article, and I have become persuaded that the future of public transit in the United States is probably going to be very Uber-like (if not actually operated by Uber, as these pilot projects are). And I think a lot of other places will follow suit, because trains are great where and when there are large volumes of people, but on-demand cars or small buses are much cheaper to operate in places and times where demand is more spread out.

The article brings up a serious shortcoming with the Uber approach, however, and that's access for people lacking the technological means to hail an Uber or with physical disabilities that make traveling in a regular passenger car difficult. The smartphone issue can be addressed in a pretty low-tech way: a phone number that someone can call and an operator can arrange for the pickup. As for folks with disabilities, I'm afraid that the best solution would be to have at least one van or small bus with a wheelchair lift that can be dispatched.

I think that the future of municipal mass transit will probably include traditional buses in most places, that don't follow a set route but instead pick up and drop people off as necessary, supplemented by cars with private drivers that provide extra capacity in peak times and possibly provide 24 hour service.

I think primarily the fear that their boss will call their bluff, and they'll be forced to either admit the scam or quit the job and have to scramble for a new one.

I worked at a game store in high school, around 1987 to 1989. This was before Magic: The Gathering was released, which really up-ended the game world. We carried the full contingent of Avalon Hill games, including a big war game selection with a whole library's worth of ASL books. You could always tell the guys who were coming in for Squad Leader stuff. They stood apart from the D&D nerds.

At some point in my tenure there, I traveled up to Baltimore to go to Avalon Hill with my boss. They had some sort of distribution center there, with a lot of miniatures, and I went to pick through their bins of random stuff and select the things that I thought would sell well. It's a great memory.

For any 40-something folks from the Washington DC suburbs out there, the store was Dream Wizards, in Rockville.

And the FINRA licensing exams focus almost entirely on the laws that are intended to protect consumers from bad actors. To study for those exams is to have it drilled into your head what you can and can't do. Unfortunately, much of what collapsed the US economy wasn't actually illegal, and in the case where laws were broken, the bankers were comfortable with knowingly bending the rules.

To be fair, the presence of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh is one of the cornerstones of the essay.

We need more casual literary criticism here at HN. Thanks!

My guess is that the "ageist" tone of his memoir it's savvy marketing. Who's going to be most interested in a memoir of a middle aged guy witnessing the horrors of working for a rich bro tech company? Who's going to buy a book, full stop? Other middle aged people who have looked at young idiots getting rich in Silicon Valley while their career prospects dwindle, that's who. So the tone of this and other articles he's written to promote the book are of course going to play up the culture clash and take sides with the older generation. Older people with wisdom and marketing experience understand these things (I kid!).

People don't realize how much difference good snow tires make. I'd rather have a FWD car with Nokian tires than an AWD car with all seasons.

Not necessary. Just weigh the bike. Racing bikes are very light. Bikes with a motor in them are substantially heavier. Any rider with a suspiciously heavy bike gets extra screening.

One of the most pressing problems is sustainably arable land. The most productive farmland in the world has been progressively losing topsoil because our modern mechanized agriculture methods are wasteful. This topsoil was deposited over millions of years by wild grasslands, then eroded away over 150 years. And as the world's population grows, much of the remaining potentially productive farmland each year gets paved over by exurbs. http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-run...

My kids and I give each other knowing glances whenever we hear it. Now we'll look for the teapot too.

I'll disagree that the perks are almost useless. But they can be a bit subtle. In comparison to people's typical experience flying, as a United 1K:

When I call the 800 number, a real human being picks up right away and helps me. If I'd like to catch an earlier or later flight, if it's within 24 hours, I can usually make the change with no charge. I use this perk dozens of times a year, and it even enables me to book cheaper flights because I'll usually be able to make adjustments on the day of travel. If I end up on the standby list, I'm put at the top (because it goes in order of highest status before first come first served). If I use miles to book a flight, I can cancel or change the flight at any time. This lets me speculatively book a vacation flight to Maui months ahead of time when availability is good, even if I'm not sure I'll be free then. My entire family gets free bags and free extra legroom seats when they travel with me. I get to sit in fancy lounges when traveling overseas. And the first class upgrades are a nice bonus.

The immediate use case I thought of when reading about it was that you don't have to worry about where to put it. You ride it to work then the robot pops up its cute little face and it drives itself back home. Then it's waiting to pick you up when you're done. Obviously, that would depend on software that's probably a lot more advanced than the current prototype. But I suppose that's why they're soliciting developers.

I would imagine that the relocated family's durable assets would be seized by the government and sold, with the proceeds going through a sort of legal laundering and being made available to them post-relocation.

That, my friend, is known as effective market segmentation.

Apple isn't making any attempt to hide the fact that its batteries are non-user-replaceable. And I think it's clear to any reasonable person that the engineering of these devices isn't intended to generate revenue for the service department, but to create an extremely slim but solid laptop. Now, I think it's very reasonable for a consumer to decide that the'd rather have a replaceable battery than a slimmer laptop, and therefore they should avoid Apple laptops. So to answer your question, I think many would agree with you that it's a bad thing, but not too many would agree that it's unethical.

That would partially explain why an Apple laptop in Europe routinely costs $500+ more than in the US.

I'm sure that in legal circles, there are a whole host of similar "law hacking" examples. This seems like a particular ingenious approach. I'd be interested to learn about other circumstances where laws are creatively misused to achieve noble ends. (The examples where the law is misused for nefarious ends are too numerous to mention).

Now we're doing reverse car analogies, comparing cars to operating systems instead of vice versa.

While it may be a hit piece, everyone at HN already thought that Carly Fiorina is a bad leader and that her tenure at HP should be hung like a millstone around her neck, not touted as her #1 qualification. Democrats can read this and feel smug about the Republican primary shitshow. Republicans can read this and feel consternation that such a bad candidate has been gaining credibility in the primary.

I don't think this article is political. It's just anti-Fiorina. It's not making fun of people for supporting her. It's ringing an alarm bell for people outside of the tech world that Fiorina's signature achievement was tanking one of America's finest technology companies.

Ran across a young Conan O'Brien appearing on young Jon Stewart's MTV talk show.

7.6.1 was pretty good. And get off my lawn!