acabal

I agree with Kellogg that individual change is both near-impossible and pointless. For most Americans it's not possible to live a day to day life without involving single use plastics and plastic packaging. For example I can't even go to my local supermarket and buy raw vegetables without involving single-use plastics: a sack of potatoes comes in a plastic bag, cucumbers are shrink wrapped (!) and often corn-on-the-cob is precut and packed in foam and plastic meat packs (!!).

Plus, at this point single-use plastic is part of our culture. How can you have Halloween without billions of tiny individually-plastic-wrapped candies? If you're an individual trying to be zero waste, are you supposed to tell your kid they can't do Halloween?

Change must necessarily come from legislation - that's the only single use plastic reduction has a chance. And I do think that people almost don't notice when it's gone - for example plastic shopping bags have been legislated away in many places in America and nobody seems to talk about that any more.

Playgrounds require you to have children with you - for example I don't think it would be socially acceptable for a group of unaccompanied adults to show up to a playground and sip some beers while they chat amongst themselves, like you might do in a public plaza in Europe.

Municipal parks, like the kind you can find in Savannah GA, are nice third spaces. But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. I would not count nature reserves as real third spaces.

I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is.

At this point, entire generations have grown up in unwalkable suburban life, using cars as the only mode of getting from point A to point B from the day they were born, with a strip mall as the only place to go - and even then only if you have to run an errand or get the occasional meal out.

Having been been isolated from a real third space like public plazas since probably the 60s or 70s, it's no surprise that today's suburban generation views them with suspicion, confusion, and disdain. They like their strip malls just fine thank you very much, and anyway, how would they park their car?

Definitely a singular and fascinating work. I produced a free ebook edition for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...

This is what the CC0 license is for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Zero_...

It's not our (SE's) choice to use XHTML in ebooks, it's part of the epub spec. So we merely expect valid XHTML per the epub spec, and valid XHTML requires self-closing tags.

That's a great idea. I've gone ahead and implemented it!

This is very cool and I explored doing this with our feeds at Standard Ebooks.[0]

But there's a gotcha:

This works fine if you serve the feed with `content-type: text/xml`, because with that content type the browser typically renders the result in-browser. But `text/xml` is technically not the correct content type for RSS feeds, `application/rss+xml` is; and when you serve it with that content type, browsers typically either open a download window instead of rendering the feed, or they render it as plain text without styling.

So you're stuck. Have a styled feed but serve it with the wrong content type, or be technically correct and serve it with the right content type, but no styling for you.

Practically, content type really doesn't matter that much, and most (all?) RSS readers are fine with `text/xml`. But for those of us who like to be technically correct...

[0] https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases

Oh I definitely do anyways, though I don't work in a typical programmer job.

I think it's important to leave room for beauty and aesthetics in men's dress, but that doesn't necessarily need to mean a suit and tie. Only very recently in history - say since around 1980 - has society decided that men's dress must be purely comfort-oriented and functional, with little or no thought given to shape, ornament, or aesthetic beauty.

I think that's a big loss, because beauty is an important part of the human spirit, and clothing is something we all have to wear every day, even if only for protection from the elements. A world where clothes are purely functional is a world where we're all dressed like Roman peasants.

Beauty in men's dress has always been a part of culture until very recently. Sure, not everyone could afford to dress beautifully, but the aspiration for men was there. We seem to have lost that aspiration of late, and I think that's kinda sad. I would call the state of men's dress aspirations today a lot of things, but "aesthetically compelling" is not one of them.

Just because suits are going out of fashion, doesn't mean there isn't a dress code anymore. A programmer at a typical startup has a dress code that's just as strict as a suit and tie ever was - except that now it's unspoken.

In other words, try showing up to your job as a programmer at your typical west coast startup wearing a fine suit and tie, just because you like the look. (Like I do!) I think you'll quickly find that the de facto dress code is, in fact, old jeans plus graphic t-shirt/hoodie, or flat-front chinos plus gingham shirt, and that your coworkers are going to sneer at you for your choice to buck this unspoken dress code.

Wearing a suit and tie for pleasure to your basic programming job might even limit your career, because it might signal to your coworkers and bosses that you're not a team player. So much for no more dress codes!

Fashions don't deserve to last forever - suits and ties are inevitably fading away even as we might hand-wring about the continuing destruction of fine dress in American society. But to suggest that dress codes are disappearing is not correct. Dress codes are as alive as they ever were, now they're just unspoken.

This is a really excellent app, I use it all the time in my garden. I planted native plants, and as they sprout every year it's very hard to tell them apart from weeds at first. But Flora Incognito does a great job of identifying most plants correctly even as they're just sprouting for the season.

That, and her characterization of Marcus Aurelius as a "misanthropic, warmongering emperor" and his Meditations as having been written "for his own edification" as if it were some kind of selfish or self-aggrandizing work worthy of dismissal.

As far as I was aware, Marcus Aurelius had a reputation as a wise and temperate philosopher king in his lifetime, and was later considered the last of the "five good emperors". If he was a warmonger then let us remind ourselves that even in the modern day our leaders have spent the last hundred years waging war somewhere or another in order to maintain a sphere of power too. And Meditations was in reality his private diary - like any regular person would routinely keep - and was not intended to ever be published. Characterizing it like she did is uncharitable at best and misleading at worst.

(Meditations is also an excellent read for those interested in Stoic philosophy.)

> Like, what's the alternative?

This is, of course, the inability to visualize a different life that I referred to in my original post. There are many alternatives to car-oriented life, as cities that grew before cars plainly evidence. Those are the cities that people want to spend their vacations in.

Instead of building shopping malls with parking lots, Colombia could relax zoning to allow chain restaurants and McDonalds near housing, and build dedicated bike lanes to get to them. Instead of building suburbs and freeways, it could build more public space like open pedestrian plazas to give people a feeling of space, and metros/bus rapid transit to make it easy to get around. Colombians who want to live a quiet suburban-style life can still do that in a rural home, which could be connected by rail when traveling to a city is required - but their choice to live a suburban life should not require those of us in cities to give up our space for wide roads to fit their cars and endless free car storage, at the expense of our way of life.

These options aren't the only alternatives Colombians could have, nor are they a fantasy - they exist today in places like Europe and parts of Asia.

Cars are not a requirement for human flourishing. We only designed our lives to make them that way.

The point is that driving should not be required to live a full life, and in fact it's much more pleasant to live without cars everywhere.

The goal of driving is to get from point A to point B. But when point A and point B are a 5 minute walk, why drive at all? Well, in America we designed our cities and suburbs to make the distance between A and B as large as possible. But we didn't have to do that!

For those who live in such cities (and not just visit), everything they want to do is a 3-15 minute walk, not a drive. You can get groceries, stop at a cafe, go to a doctor's appointment, and pick up your kids from school (or better yet, they can walk themselves, because their school is nearby and getting killed by speeding SUVs is not a concern) - all within a 15 minute radius. If the walk is truly too far, a metro stop is often nearby.

Living in such places is eye-opening!

I've been railing against cars in the US for years and years. The thing is that today most people in the US under the age of 60 grew up in cars, usually in a suburban environment, and it's actually impossible for them to imagine what life without a car might even look like. It's like trying to describe a color. If we can't even visualize an alternative, how are we supposed to achieve the alternative?

Only by traveling to places that were developed before cars took a chokehold on the world can people realize how nice it is to live without them absolutely everywhere.

Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. They often choose to leave their suburb and spend their 2 weeks in urban environments like Barcelona, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, etc., that where built for people and not cars, because it's so pleasant to live like that, and because letting cities develop for people first leads to cities that people actually want to be in, with car-free streets, plazas, promenades, etc. (Yes, today those places are also full of cars. But, unlike American cities, their skeletons are people-first and cars are the invasive element.)

It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we've isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there's no spontaneous social interaction because everyone's always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk.

What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life. Places like Colombia, which I visit often, are building shopping malls, big-box stores, parking lots, suburbs, and freeways, while after almost 100 years of that type of car-first development in America we're only just starting to realize that actually it might not be that great.

I think it's important to note that they're luxuries in the modern society we've built for ourselves in the West. Long, long ago, small communities without access to high-speed travel provided social support; no cars and little white-collar work means exercise was baked into life with much walking and manual labor; diet was mostly unprocessed food farmed nearby; and no screens or even electricity meant sleep well before midnight till dawn.

Of course, there were plenty of problems back then, too - I'm not saying it was an idyllic utopia. But in our modern life, it seems like we've just traded one set of problems for another.

While both are good fits for their specific use cases, I think JSON won as an medium of exchange because unlike XML, JSON is dead simple to parse and ingest programmatically.

What makes XML so unergonomic to ingest is 1) attributes, which don't map cleanly to a basic data structure that you might find in a programming language, and 2) namespaces, which are extremely, extremely tedious to program against.

Programmers are going to use the format that's the easiest to ingest and manipulate. JSON wins in that regard, hands down. Every time I need to write logic to ingest a namespaced XML document I heave a deep sigh and brace myself for another long week of fighting with LXML. But with JSON it's as easy as `json_decode($str)` and move on with your life.

Historically, that is what it meant to be middle class. Before there was an established middle class, there was only the upper class - aristocracy who inherited wealth and land - and the poor. You might find a rich merchant from time to time but they were the exception and not a class. Once the industrial revolution kicked in, it became possible for a large amount of people to amass wealth without having inherited it. If you were able to do that, you were part of the new "middle class". Of course, there is often much sniffing and consternation over the super-wealthy middle class occasionally trying to elbow their way up the social ladder into the upper class.

If this woman's father bought her a trip in 1959, then he may have made his money in the 1920s, when the middle class was only just firming up. It would have been correct at the time to think of him as middle class, even though to us today he seems pretty wealthy. That's because his class status was defined by him being a businessperson who presumably did it himself, as opposed to having inherited wealth, land, or title.

The rise of the middle class was the cause of much cultural introspection at the time. There's a lot of thoughtful and beautiful literature about it, like Howards End[1] and The Forsyte Saga[2].

Of course, today "I'm middle class" means "I earn enough to own a car and take a vacation once a year." But that's a modern shift of definition and not quite what it meant for this woman's father in the first half of the century.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/howards-end

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-galsworthy/the-forsyt...

Indeed, and the article is right in saying there isn't really a way out. Humanity paints itself into these kinds of corners fairly frequently over the course of history: entrenched systems where many suffer, but where too many powerful people benefit for it to be able to change.

Traditionally, the solution has been violent revolution. That's really the only way to (for example) tell 66% of Americans that their biggest asset that they've spent a lifetime saving for and investing in is now worthless because trust us, everyone is better off when housing isn't an investment.

But America is in a strange place in human development. There are enough bread and circuses in the form of cheap Netflix, cell phones, and food supply where even the totally destitute just don't have the desire to grab a pitchfork and physically march to their capital building. (And I would argue that January 6 was more of a social-media-fueled livestream event than any kind of attempt at coherent political change.)

Plus, suburban sprawl and the isolated, car-based lifestyle we've cultivated in the past century means that even if you wanted to get a group of like-minded revolutionaries together and march, how would you even physically do that? How does a poor person in suburban Tulsa even meet 20 like-minded people, and where would they go to express their displeasure physically? Once they got there, where would they all park?

Planting native plants is very rewarding, and you don't need a lot of space to do it, either.

The only space for greenery in our condo, located in a major urban center, is a small strip of mud at the side of the building. A few years ago I seeded it with native plants, and they grew spectacularly. Spring through fall we have colorful native flowers that attract a huge amount of bees of various species, butterflies, and other pollinators - in the middle of a giant city!

It's a great feeling to step outside and see flowers and greenery that belong, covered in busy life that was never there before! You don't need a lot of space, and you can do it in a city too.

Angry Video Game Nerd has a great video on Chex Quest, in which he concedes that it's actually a surprisingly good game for its time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg0y9i5E7nY

I've been using TB for over 15 years now, and in that whole time Local Folders has been 100% useless for me. Just visual clutter. I even created an addon to hide it permanently, which got fairly popular and existed until they changed the plugin architecture a few years back. Once the addon broke, someone else created a working alternative almost immediately.

I understand why Local Folders exists, but never once in 15 years have I actually used it. It's about time they created a native option to hide it, and that's coming from an old fogy!

Yes, they sent a prepaid label to return the bad drives. I did a secure erase both via Linux command line and via their proprietary software and it seemed to work. The whole process took about 3 weeks per drive.

Indeed! Fortunately the RAID was also backed-up offsite. But, the entire process was shocking in several ways.

At least Samsung was fairly speedy with the RMAs and it was basically no-questions-asked... because I imagine they're getting tons of these mailed back to them.

Yes, this bit me just last month. Around October 2022 I purchased 3 Samsung 870 EVO 2TBs for use in a RAID array. By January 2023, all three of them failed within a week of each other!

Fortunately they failed one by one, so I was barely was able to recover my RAID array by pulling out one drive at a time, powering the computer off, and waiting for the RMA replacement to arrive.

But imagine my shock to see one drive fail... only to replace it with an RMA... and then days later, seeing the next drive fail... and the next!

In the US, copyright status is determined by when something was published, not how old it is. The two are not related. That's how we get stupid things like the University of California and the Mark Twain Foundation claiming a copyright on his autobiography, written circa 1909, until 2047 - 137 years after his death.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_Mark_Twain#Ma...

Correction: At SE we don't "modernize old timey phrases". We perform sound-alike spelling updates only. For example clew -> clue, chuse -> choose. Changes are mostly conservative and obvious. People hear "modernize old timey phrases" and they go nuts thinking we're turning Macbeth into Hunger Games. That's just not accurate.

This linked version of Leviathan is a fun project but it's emphatically not the kind of thing we do at SE.

I produced a free ebook edition of Mutual Aid for Standard Ebooks last year: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid

It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of philosophy.

In any case, it suffers a little for what I think is the naive thesis of "if only mankind could cooperate like the animals do, we would live in a utopia." Of course, mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense, so the point seems rather moot.