abap_rocky

> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?

This reminds me almost precisely of the dynamics of pro sports in the US and how fans are getting priced out of attending games or even watching teams on TV as organizations shift to bespoke streaming platforms.

Yeah, also the fact that most venues take a cut of merch sales really dampens the idea that buying merch directly from artists is the best way to put money in their pocket.

I even recall going to a show many years ago where the lead singer refused to sell his t-shirts at the venue and implored us all to meet him outside at their tour van for direct sales. I don't think he got invited back to perform there!

I was reading an interview with the band "Agriculture" recently and they had a really interesting take on this. From this interview https://www.treblezine.com/agriculture-interview-quiet-viole... :

"DM: We exist as a band because we sell t-shirts. Our job is that we sell t-shirts and the way we promote those t-shirts is by playing music. If we were talking strictly economically, that’s just a fact.

LL: Weirdly, it’s also our most direct engagement with the money we make and with our fans. We’re often selling our own shirts at the merch table; that’s actually how we talk to a lot of fans and get feedback on our sets. We get cash in our hands; that’s one of the most direct economic exchanges in our lives as musicians. So, it is funny because it seems cynical, but it’s actually one of the more grounded exchanges in what we do."

As it turns out, I had a nice little chat with their drummer when I bought one of their tshirts.

Sure, when you compare a "nice suburb" to a "rough area" of the city you'll come to such conclusions. But if the city you lived in is anything like mine, that disorder you experienced is likely highly localized to those "rough areas". Given this, it might be more helpful to compare a "nice suburb" to a "nice area" in a city.

I'm glad you chose the experience of taking a walk as your original example because it was instrumental in helping me to decide that I wanted to raise my family in the city.

COVID offered an opportunity for my young family to spend a month in the suburbs and the thing that sticks with me now after all these years later is how much I hated taking our then 1 year-old for a walk as compared to the city. In the suburbs we walked past the same houses on the same sidewalk-lacking streets barely seeing anyone else. If we wanted anything beyond that it required loading our toddler into the car.

Compare this to a nice area of the city where the density allows for a vast array of possible destinations and plenty of folks to smile or wave at on the way. Walks these days could be to the local park on a Saturday morning for the farmers market, or to the local Italian Ice spot because the weather hasn't gotten too cold yet. While it's still possible to have those experiences in the suburbs, it's hard to be as spontaneous when you've got to consider things like car seats and parking.

This music video perfectly captures the essence of 16-inch softball. I believe Serengeti still plays in a Chicago 16-inch league to this day.

One of the most recent inter-city routes to open, the Borealis service between Chicago and St. Paul, far surpassed expected ridership levels in its first year servicing 212K passengers over a projected 155K [1]. This comes despite the fact the trip would be faster not only by air but also by car. I doubt we'd see this sort of overperformance if "most people don't want trains".

[1]: https://www.news8000.com/news/amtraks-borealis-line-celebrat...

Literally had the same experience this past weekend driving out to the Chicago suburbs. Doesn't matter if general traffic is going 15 over, you're still going to have a handful of unsatisfied daredevils just blowing past at 30 or more over as they weave between those "slower" cars.

I'm glad you mentioned Genesis because they're the subject of one of my favorite samples. OutKast's famous track "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" contains a sample from Genesis's "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight" and upon learning this, I just thought it was so cool that OutKast listened to Peter-Gabriel-era Genesis when Genesis was very much a progressive rock band rather than the pop powerhouse most know them as today.

My personal favorite is a provider that opted to have a separate endpoint for refesh tokens rather than following the spec and using the token endpoint with a refesh token grant type.

The author of this article lives in La Grange which is a relatively wealthy Chicago Suburb (this is public information on her Twitter profile). Using those same 2019 FBI crime stats referenced in that Wikipedia article, you can find that La Grange experienced zero murders and had an overall violent crime rate of 10 per 100k (vs. Chicago's 943 per 100k).

Given the low crime rate in La Grange, citing crime statistics in this case does not fully account for differences between parenting in Switzerland and US suburbs, even if that suburb happens to be a Chicago suburb.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

This is precisely what I do and it's great. Built myself a workstation desktop last year that I wanted to access remotely via an older laptop and it's worked beautifully, even when I was out in Europe for a week last summer.

When my then 4 month-old was hospitalized with RSV last year, the medical staff told us the main issue with RSV in very young children (under 6 months) is that their respiratory system is still immature. That is, their airways are still very small and their coughs are less productive. This means that RSV symptoms that would be manageable for an older child can become potentially life threatening for the very young.

For example, if your toddler has a stuffy nose, you can help them to blow it. For an infant, you need a tool to suction their nose which can be difficult to do. That same stuffy nose might cause poor feeding and dehydration which on top of the general breathing issues caused by RSV can lead to a rapid deterioration in the infant's health.

Even with all the supportive care (oxygen, regular suctioning, a feeding tube), it took a full 5 days in the hospital for our infant to recover.

My first-hand experience with this seems to be consistent with larger trends as well. A recent CDC presentation shows that children age 0-5 months are hospitalized by RSV at far higher rates than any other age group. [1]

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

My favorite thing about the touchscreen on the used car I bought 2 years ago is how the lower third of the screen no longer accepts any input. Given that many important buttons and options are only present on this region of the screen, I'm essentially locked out of using them. To this day I've never been able to configure Bluetooth.

It's easy to imagine how Twitter can be worse because you can just look at Facebook.

The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office.

I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and work area doesn't help matters.

Another unexpected thing I've found that I missed while working from home is a commute. Now I imagine a person's opinion of their commute is highly conditioned on the mode of transportation but in my case it's a mostly relaxing public transit ride where I had 20-30 minutes of unstructured time to read, listen to a podcast, or just zone out. It similarly helped create additional space to separate the work life from the home life.

This second point on a commute would probably completely change if I had a 90 minute drive in bumper to bumper traffic. If that was my life, there's a good chance I'd find work from home preferable.

Yep, I remember that post as well. Was described as "Do-nothing scripting" and I've applied the concept as well.

Original Article: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495739

Presumably you don't park all of these cars at your residence. If so, I can imagine that factors into your difficulty in finding rentals.

I think there's merit to deliberately teaching concepts like analyzing the source of a particular news story. Coincidentally, it was an AP Euro course I took at my Illinois Highschool that first made me aware of such a concept. My teacher put a special emphasis on analyzing bias in source documents that were provided in the document based questions in the AP exam.

I may not remember much of the European history taught in the class, but the idea of analyzing bias has stuck with me ever since. My experience may have not been universal amongst my classmates though which exposes how this type of incidental teaching to analyze bias might be insufficient and a more intentional approach is warranted.

The fact that I was taught the concept in a history class devoted to a different continent helped to mitigate some of the problems that might present themselves when trying to teach it in the context of current events. My hope would be that this type of news literacy education would similarly focus on historical accounts which, while not wholly sufficient, could create some distance between the daily news onslaught which can distract from actually developing the skill.

The problem with aggregators like this is they themselves have their own implicit bias in how they define the boundaries of the left and right.

While sites like The Federalist and Breitbart may offer an accurate sampling of palatable far right viewpoints, this does not extend to the far left. The deficiency is exposed with the inclusion of CNN and MSNBC in the far left category. You need only look at the 2020 Democratic primary and observe how these cable channels reacted to the Sanders campaign[1] to get a sense of how incoherent it is to place them there.

What is lost in defining the left border as such is the erasure of publications on the far left that help describe some of the ideas and thought that drove Bernie's popularity. Of course he eventually lost the primary but can we really call CNN and MSNBC far left when they played a role in the demise of the most viable left-wing candidate in recent US history?

This is an important consideration because a news diet of the CNN, NYT, WSJ and Ben Shapiro may appear to be balanced but there is no left source that is the same magnitude of the right wing Ben Shapiro.

[1]: https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1231353446336548867?s...

I agree 100%. I think hip-hop in particular makes it very easy to trace these relations with it's heavy use of samples and collaboration.

For example, Common's Album "Be" is the album that started me on my path back in 2009. I really liked the album and using those relations I was able to discover so much more music:

1. Kanye West produced it

  -> Check-out other Kanye production credits

    -> Jay-Z's "The Blueprint"
    -> Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III"
    -> Kanye's solo albums

2. Marvin Gaye's "God is Love" is sampled in the song "Love is..."

  -> Check-out Marvin Gaye's album "What's Going On"

3. John Legend is a feature on "They Say"

  -> Check-out John Legend's album "Get Lifted"

Of course, it might be a little silly to think I needed to discover big names like Kanye, Common and John Legend but the process of discovering them through the music itself can help separate the artist from some of their non-musical pursuits that might not be as interesting.

Is there a reason you chose a link to the Media Research Center for the polling on healthcare rather than the poll itself[1]? The Media Research Center (MRC) is unapologetically opposed to left-wing ideas. From their About Us[2] section:

>The Media Research Center is America’s premier media watchdog. Since 1987, the MRC has worked to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media."

Is that a source that we should trust to have a balanced view of a left-wing policy proposal? While the poll does show that only 21% support abolishing private insurance, it also shows that only 32% oppose abolishing private insurance. So you have a lot of people that aren't committed either way when it comes to private insurance. Overall, 56% support a national program even if it leads to higher taxes (vs 40% oppose). So the underlying data is quite different from what you are presenting.

[1]: http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/07/01/rel8a.-.democrats.a...

[2]: https://www.mrc.org/about