asark

I'm pretty sure all magazines do that. I just buy issues I want on ebay now, after being burned by that. Cheaper than the "discount" subscriber rate, cheaper than buying backissues directly from the magazine. Ebay's probably selling all my info too but they've already got it anyway.

It's usually companies or management/product folks paying for their product to have the peacock feathers. See also: flat/material redesigns not to improve usability—in fact it may make it worse—but to avoid "looking old", not because users complained or metrics look bad but because someone with a budget guesses maybe they might. Similar with choices to make fairly simple sites into heavy SPAs with questionable performance.

> It's because I've been trying very hard to understand what your contention is.

I appreciate it. Seriously!

Framework-dependent projects tend to go stale and become "ew I don't wanna touch that, it's so last year, we should probably replace it with [newer version of framework that's gonna end up being much harder to upgrade than expected / other framework]" surprisingly fast once eyes are off them, in my experience. Without someone competent doing continual upkeep, the next guy/gal's gonna try to sell the re-write anyway. May not succeed, but they'll try. Framework or no.

In theory, yes. In practice, by the time you get your whole web-app game on, the full round trip is often at least as fast, and frequently faster.

Secretly leave the Android one React Native since it does a decent job of papering over Android's worst rough spots, despite how often React Native breaks and how LOLWTF its ecosystem and release management is?

Oh, I get the appeal of land. Country living makes sense to me, and appeals. Done that. I like dense, walkable 'burbs, with nearby stuff to do, too.

Not a fan of apartment living (at least not for a family) though I get why people like it. What I don't like and can't understand the appeal of are typical low-density-but-not-low-density-enough suburbs, though. Worst of both worlds—few or no things in walking distance, not enough space to do much with or keep the neighbors away, but enough you have to own some stuff to keep it up, and the neighbors mean you have to keep it up. Ugh. Unfortunately it's that or suburban apartments (now that may truly be the worst of all options) if you want decent or good schools, in our city. Schools in denser areas are mostly bad, schools in the country are mostly bad. It sucks.

I mean SPAs and near-SPAs. "Web apps". Web sites as in mostly server-rendered sites with HTML, CSS, and some JS sugar on top could sub in for an awful lot of "web apps" and improve UX, performance, maintainability, and development cost.

[EDIT] incidentally I notice you keep arguing against things I've not actually written.

I don't think the JS devs drove it, at least not primarily. I think they're largely eager to exploit the enthusiasm of others (and probably they should be) and I've seen it happen. I do think it's peculiar to the web. Most other GUI app ecosystems are content not to invent their own visual vocabularies over and over or twist every mundane little program or UI element into an "experience", for instance—I think that has something to do with it. It's the set of norms and (self-imposed, to a significant extent) expectations of the web, of the fear of "falling behind" (see again: peacock feathers). I think the background of the Web in bespoke brochure-type graphic design and marketing has an absolute ton to do with it.

I think a lot of the cost has to do with the underlying tech not really being that great for what it's being made to do, in concert with everyone feeling the need to try to be special in even the tinies little looks and behaviors. It's also where a lot of the audience is so will tend to experience oddities like this more exaggeratedly than other fields.

Your manager or project owner or whoever says "we want a webapp" are you gonna stick your neck out and argue against it? "But it's what google's doing", "but Gartner", but whatever. It's cheaper! OK, sure, here's my bill. It's absolutely follow-the-leader behavior, damn the cliff. And it works well enough that it does get the job done, eventually. It's just not necessarily doing the users any favors, or your bottom line.

Decision makers do strange stuff all the time because they think it makes them look better—and, to the extent and in the way they expect it to, they are probably right more often than not. This is just one example. Whole world's run by guesswork, personal quirks of taste or incentive, and blame-avoidance (follow the trends), more than anything else, from what I've seen. It's just people, running around doing funny people stuff, hoping no-one calls their bluff.

[EDIT] actually, look at Java Applets and, more so, Flash. Folks hated the way lots of those were used, but the worst and least-justifiable uses of them happened anyway, for a long time, because managers wanted the bling. That was, seriously, it. And developers went "oh sweet I can add Flash 5 and Actionscript to my résumé, I've been wanting to play with that". That's exactly what happened then. This is exactly the same thing, just much bigger. And in both cases sometimes the tech was used well.

No, web development overall hasn't. Web apps specifically are largely fad-chasing vanity (manager, organizational level) or that, yeah. Which is cool because there's all kinds of dumb money flying around for them now—that part's been amazing. But it's not serving users well. Peacock feathers.

> If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

Hi. I have a fundamental understanding of what people are building. Most of it's overcomplicated and the "web app or not?" decision's very often made due to hype, résumé padding, or making a project look more impressive to other internal folks. Some of it's justifiable as a "webapp" is truly a decent choice but still usually performs worse than is reasonable, indicating overcomplication under the hood—look at various Google "webapp"s performance dropping steadily over the years as features remain similar or drop off, and that's not even comparing them to older non-webapp incarnations which are universally much snappier (though usually missing some features, to be fair).

All the state management stuff seems to be tied up in (=synonymous with) attempts to purify JS frameworks and codebases, as in "purely functional". It's... kinda silly and far removed from either the problem at hand, or the strengths of Javascript (such as they are) much of the time.

Meanwhile objects representing various parts of the view, and plenty of models that don't look much like "modern" JS state management, remain the norm elsewhere, and the sky is not falling. I do not know what to make of it. I go along with it when in that sort of company—when in Rome, and all that—but the evangelism can be pretty funny.

Anyway a bunch of the stuff isn't half as special as you'd think reading about it through the usual channels. Redux? A data cache and a so-so local event bus with somewhat awkward semantics and a few really bad terminology choices thrown in. Whee. There's your "state management". Not that it's useless, but you'd swear it's black magic reading all the blog posts about it.

It's not like bodies of water are always blue anyway. The ocean's not. I've seen the same broad stretch of the upper Mississippi appear anywhere from pale green to battleship grey, along with several shades of blue including almost sapphire. The lower part of the Missouri's mostly brown or grey. I'd assume anyone who described it as any kind of blue without apparent purpose or calling attention to how unusual that is had simply never seen it.

The later example in TFA of the Bible using the phrase "red horse" is an odd one. There are red horses. Hell Steinbeck wrote a novella titled "The Red Pony". They're pretty common. What's the big deal?

> I always considered that phrase in Homer as a poetic flourish, or maybe just something that was a figure of speech in his time period.

I'd say it's a worthy phrase—to put it mildly—whether or not you know what blue is. I wouldn't count it as evidence that they were unfamiliar with the concept of blue.

> My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has

How is that not essentially zero, in most political circumstances and for non-extraordinary individuals? That's my point.

[EDIT] and further:

> That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

I think I'm giving it a pretty fair shake by acknowledging there's any laudable purpose to actions of personal behavioral choice on large political problems. There is, but it has little to do with effecting change, if that's the part that's important.

Well, I'm just coming at it from the perspective of observed efficacy in the real world. It's fine in a Kantian moral sense or whatever, if your goal is personal ethical edification. If your goal is to make things better it's a poor tool to rely on.

The problem's not so much that they can fail—any method can—as that they can fail with anything short of overwhelming and sustained support, that is, they can be wildly popular and still have no long-term effect at all. Better to look elsewhere—no amount of "if we'd all just do it, we could fix this!" will change that.

Again, as a personal choice, fine. As an alternative to more-effective means, no. It's not "arrogant", it's an outcome-focussed stance fitting with observed reality and current scholarship.

[EDIT] "They" being "movements mostly based on changes in personal behavior patterns, at some significant personal cost or risk"

> I've stopped thinking of doctors as friends, and instead as salespeople preying on people in their most vulnerable state. That oath is just another ruse in the sales process.

Same, I basically consider a doctor an adversary until they give me reason to believe otherwise. Probably some of the ones who pass that filter are adversaries, still, and are making me pay for crap I shouldn't need to or directing me to providers who are more expensive to get kickbacks or whatever, they're just better at hiding it.

They are, as a profession, failing hard at upholding their oath. The insurance industry may be a uniquely useless part of providing medical care, but they do not deserve all the blame for the massive harm that's being done. Hospitals and doctors are a huge part of it, too.

[EDIT] I guess I think of them like mechanics now, actually, in that I figure any time I follow their advice and it causes me to give them money there's about an even chance I'm their mark, not their customer/patient.

Cities can run parks, I'm not saying open up your lawn to others, our society's too batshit crazy for that. We have some city-run parks, they're just way less common than they could be with somewhat smaller lawns and part of the cost savings from smaller yards going toward park upkeep. Could have a house-lot-sized one every few houses by just squeezing the houses very slightly closer together, and could have huge ones every few houses with significantly smaller lawns. Every single house within a two minute walk of a nice park, maintained at a cost lower than maintaining all that space divided among a bunch of individual families.

Of course cities seem to quickly be abdicating care of common spaces to HOAs anyway, with neighborhoods and common spaces laid out by developers with little or no incentive to fix this problem—another part of the death of the commons and the atomization of civic life and the growth of "eff you, I got mine" generally—so I'm just pulling an Old Man Yells at Cloud here. Though this is literally why we can't have nice things, so it remains frustrating.

> Maybe technical or maybe just that the person who is going to send off money so that their social security number isn't taken away or so that the police don't come to their house and arrest them on felony charges are more likely to respond to a call--even a robo one--than a text message.

That occurred to me, but you can direct someone straight to a website that can then do god-knows-what with a text message, and they're even easier to automate and do in quick, huge batches than phone calls, so even at a much lower % success rate I'd think they'd be viable for scammers, and maybe even preferable to calls. Maybe they're more expensive to send? That'd be dumb, but then phone billing's never made any sense.

At least three years to break even, versus paying for lawn service (for me, anyway), not counting opportunity cost from spending all that up front rather than over time. Gonna guess I'd spend more time fiddling with it than I do on lawn service (probably not more than a minute a week), plus looks like there's an installation process that'd take time. Limited warranty only lasts two years, not even covering the entire time it'd take to break even. Hard pass. Maybe when they're down around $750 and no less reliable.

[EDIT] plus the lawn service does edging. So. Really not competitive.

Lawns are under-utilized capacity. Mostly too small or poorly laid out (like, almost all front lawns, for instance) to be much use. A pain to maintain, and done individually rather than more cheaply and efficiently as a group. Every other house with a playset rather than having lawns half the size and a couple much nicer, maintained parks per block. They're absurd.

Chickens and/or pigs used to be how one dealt with food scraps that couldn't go back into the field/garden. After first using them to make broth or whatever, if possible. A recycling system that turns garbage into food.

> I ended up just cutting out farmed meat in the end. As far as meat goes, I can eat what I kill. Apart from if someone has already got me food and didn't know, as to turn that down seems both a waste and kind of rude.

Pretty common rule for mendicant Buddhists, as I understand it. No meat is the general rule, but if you go a-begging and someone gives you meat, and you don't have reason to believe they killed something (or had someone else kill something) specifically for you, then you're good to eat it (or even obligated to).

Idiomatic usage ("bear in mind") and register ("gist") even came off as native, without running into common give-aways like incorrect or technically-OK-but-not-quite-right prepositions. Nice.

The problem is that often changing your own behavior hurts you more than it works to effect change, unless lots of others also spontaneously jump onboard. Which, more or less certainly, they won't, so you're basically just self-flagellating in a closet, which might make you feel morally pure but isn't doing anything to change the world. This is a pretty well-studied part of political science (and probably is covered in other disciplines like sociology, I'd expect) so there's a ton of both theoretical and practical (case) studies on the topic.

Coordination problems (and very serious problems of information access & distribution) are why things like boycotts are in fact, however much we might wish otherwise, so laughably bad at enforcing community norms on e.g. large companies, and why the market doesn't do a great job of just "sorting out" all kinds of things most people would consider to be problems.

Everyone expects you to have a phone number for some things. Certainly many online services expect you to be reachable via SMS for 2-factor auth. VOIP service plus a semi-decent data plan is at least as expensive as just adding on voice, and then you have two bills instead of one. You can simply ignore calls when you're not expecting one—if it actually matters they'll leave a voicemail. Those get transcribed so I don't even need to listen to see whether it was a scam or something important.

It has made phone calls probably the worst way to reach me, though. Not sure why I don't receive more text spam, which is nearly nonexistent—must be some technical reason.

Yep. Solution is recursive fines. Spam calls from network provider? Issue a warning. Keep it up? The fines start and don't stop coming in until the calls stop. They ignore the fines and are outside your jurisdiction? Warn every company they transit through. They don't block them? The fines start. Rinse, repeat, until you find someone who you can effectively fine or who cares about the warnings (because you can effectively fine them) and they either bring down the banhammer (which those other entities will care about, even if they don't care about the fines) or they find a technical solution.

These calls are largely preying on the elderly. They're despicable and it's disgusting it's taken us so long to stop them—there's no excuse, it's not like human beings don't control every part of what's happening, this isn't some force of nature. Nuke them from orbit.

> All I am reading is that the NHTSA has bad tests?

Seems like a testing policy designed to keep people from avoiding buying small cars ever, and/or to keep people from agitating to ban or otherwise legally discourage heavy road vehicles.

I'm pretty sure, left to my own devices, my life would be a series of weeks largely focusing on one or two things each. Some of these might last as long as a month or two, for bigger projects. Focused programming for a couple weeks, then a week of working on my house, then a week of garden building & set-up, then a week of working on music, a three-week run of research and writing, and so on.

What sucks is spending 50ish weeks a year doing 40 hours/wk of the same damn thing. I don't hate hard work—I love it—I hate lack of autonomy to choose what to work on, in a very broad sense. Work is nice, jobs are fucking awful.

> “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the healthcare theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents 1 million, 2 million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”

— Then-Senator Obama, 2006

So they do talk about it, and it's one of several drag-on-the-economy stealth (useless—one of the categories of the "bullshit" classification, in Graeber's taxonomy) jobs programs we have, because we can't have better-run more-beneficial actual jobs programs since those would be socialist.

[EDIT] source of the quote: https://www.thenation.com/article/mr-obama-goes-washington/

Other bacteria join the party, not just yeast.

[EDIT] which are fungi anyway, incidentally