csw-001

I’ve worked with a fountain pen daily for decades. It’s funny how they become linked in your mind to event. This is the one I signed my marriage license with. This is the one I wrote the bar exam with.

Now I’m teaching my children to write. I got them a fountain pen, and they love using it. It’s exacting, so they have to form letters properly, and if they don’t mind their non-writing hand they will end up smudged and inky. I was reluctant at first to hand a kid an ink-filled fountain pen - but it’s turned out great, and they are so much better with it than pencils and ball points.

I had a similar situation - but I figured it out pretty quickly because my Firewalla actually warned that device was an iphone in anon mode, and prompted to turn Mac spoofing off if I wanted device-level tracking. I highly recommend Firewalla for home networking issues of this sort, it’s the only thing that gives a relative networking novice like me a fighting chance.

How is photo/video sharing handled? I am looking for an e2e encryption channel to share family photos in a group chat style messager with grandparents and groups of friends.

This is great advice - I learned a slightly different way…

I’d saved up for a while when I was 20ish, and I wanted a NEW car. Only thing I could get a loan for was the cheapest offering - a stripped manual Honda Fit. I fell in love with it and ordered one from Japan (they didn’t have a fully stripped version for sale in my town, so it was a “special” order).

Long story short, I learned to drive stick for the first time when I picked it up from the lot with zero miles and had to drive it home, and then to work the next day… that first commute was UGLY. But I more or less had the hang of it by the time I got home that night. I still drive that car daily almost two decades later - and I absolutely still love it. It’s never needed one thing beyond regular maintenance in all those 150k miles. They literally don’t make ‘um like that any more.

I appreciate that you address head on the notion that people can “just give money directly” and you provide a link.

What I think I’m missing is the Why? Why would I want Glo? What’s better about owning this crypto currency than just parking my $1000 in an FDIC insured bank account and donating $25?

(Honest question - not trying to troll here at all - I’m just not seeing a reason to turn money into Glo Coin)

Hershey (all profits go to boys boarding school) is a case in point - but the argument there is actually the exact opposite - that dead hand control is keeping the mission from shifting to be more inclusive.

If the logging analogy holds, then I don't think this is purely an issue of profits above all - it's more an issue of short-termism. If you are Facebook, you could reasonably stay relevant, focus on content quality, and shift to a profit model that looks a lot more like Morton Salt's - steady as she goes. In the long run, sans other goals, that might be the rational thing to do.

On the other hand, if you are looking to preserve stock price in the short-term you need to at least create the illusion of sustainable revenue growth. And there is a lot to be said for this later strategy if you don't really want to run Facebook in maintenance phase. Seems that Mark and Co. might not be all that concerned about "deforesting" Facebook with ads because the end game here is the Metaverse...?...

I'm not sure it's the advertising dollars that are addictive as much as it is "growth". To keep the stock price up you have sustain a PE that reflects revenue growth, and once you are done signing up new users... Well... Something's got to give.

I see the ads as a lot like cutting timber out of a finite forest - it's profitable, but potentially harmful to the ecosystem in a way that can make it unsustainable. As long as you don't cut too much, replant aggressively, then you can make a sustainable business out of it - but it doesn't scale past the point where your harm to the ecosystem causes collapse. Once people exit FB because it's all ads, then the network benefits begin to evaporate, a little bit at first, then all at once...

Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)

Education has value beyond improving income potential. It would be really interesting to see correlation between those those who entered college only (or primarily) to improve income, and those who sought a humanities degree for other reasons, to see if they got out of the degree what they wanted.

This analysis also doesn't include minors or elective courses - I'm wondering how many folks (like myself) chose to pursue a humanities minor to get a lot of the value-add of studying something like philosophy without being pigeon-holed in a humanities pathway?

If the artificial version is so life like you can’t tell it’s not a “real” transmission does it pass the “touring test”?

This is such a neat idea! I’ve been doing this manually for years… I’m surprised Bandcamp hasn’t done something like this on its own. The Bandcamp weekly show is cool, and I appreciate curation, but a simple random walk through the best sellers as “radio” is what I’ve always wanted.

Thanks!

My first thought here was "tools like this could be a really cool to help improve the quality of my student's papers." My immediate second thought was "this trend in tooling is going to lead to tons of AI churned summary copypasta in all of the future paper's I read."

It’s really interesting to read this as my children are currently screaming unhappily because they aren’t being allowed to eat ice cream until they vomit…

Totally. And it becomes a cultural phenomenon - neighbors and coworkers are chatting about it … you want to be part of that moment. Here’s what I wonder - what is the maximum frequency of big media hyped jackpots? Would we all do this again next week, next month? I don’t think so. Maybe next year?

Sure.

Law enforcement is a really important voice in emergency management. They manage a lot of the manmade threat analysis, reporting and mitigation, and serve as a huge piece of the response to most disasters. I think any planning endeavor that doesn't get their feedback risks not having an adequate understanding of their capability and their buy-in during a response. That said, the tone of the conversations about how a community should prepare for something like civil unrest can pivot simply on what you call it (civil unrest, uprising, riot, disturbance, etc.) - and if you aren't careful, an honest exploration of what could be done better can come off as an indictment of LE or their involvement.

The biggest areas where I typically see legitimate differences of perspective (and so might change my messaging or introduction of a concept slightly based on 5.11 pants) is in the application of what is traditionally thought of as military technology or terminology to civilian emergency management. For example, whether and to what extent response agencies should have drones (really incredibly useful tool for damage assessment), and managing the privacy concerns around those. Another example of an area I might shift how I frame a discussion is the role, extent, and nature of school shooting drills. In my experience, LE (especially those with lived active shooter experience) seem more comfortable with "real life simulations" that include a person pretending to be a "bad guy", carrying real looking fake guns, and setting off real sounding "gun shot simulators" to train kids how to respond. Final thought, should we call our regular reports "SitReps" and release them as part of our "battle rhythm" - analyzing them during our "hot wash" sessions. None of those terms is offensive in-and-of-itself, but if I'm in a non-tactical pants room I might soften those edges with "regular updates", "operational tempo", or "post-event discussion".

To be clear, judging a person by their pants is about as useful as judging a book its cover - but when I've got to get up in front of a room to start a planning process around a controversial topic area you'll take all the heuristics you can to try and frame things for a productive conversation. That's also, by the way, why I like introductions and ice breakers. They might be dumb for the group, and seem a waste of time, but a good facilitator is shifting message slightly and thinking about framing issues based on those snippets.

I work in homeland security consulting, and I find this division of folks by pant type a useful heuristic. Our work brings together a lot of emergency management adjacent folks, and being able to quickly group them visually into how likely they are to have a law enforcement perspective on an issue is really helpful when messaging and engaging on controversial topics.

1 in 10 Americans is going hungry...^1 It's not always about how many blueberries we are all eating as a group - justice demands we consider who is getting to eat at all. It would be great if we could close some of that food security gap with the savings "we" are experiencing on cheaper hammers and batteries.

I really enjoy charts and analysis like this, and sometimes a controversial headline is what is needed to start a discussion - so thanks for sharing. I think this analysis begs for follow-up charts showing how these items and spending vary by race, class, location, etc. When we say "we" are mostly living better, who exactly is in that group? Seems like that's an important consideration in asking whether "we" are achieving our goals as a society.

1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

Aeropress, Roam Research.

We spend a lot on our healthcare system because we spend so little on our public health systems. An ounce of prevention…

Really? We like to elect them President from time to time…

This is such a great point. Soil lead testing in the U.S. is cheap through University Extension programs. U of Delaware will test mid-Atlantic soil for nutrients and Lead for under $20. You not only get to learn the science of what your soil is lacking, you avoid poisoning yourself and others!

So a lot of the philosophy and marketing puff here resonates with me - but I'm not seeing a demo, and I'm not able to login without a Google account?

You don’t sound combative at all. As others pointed out - the main issues with the 401k is liquidity and taxes. If your going to rely on that as emergency funds you’d want to make sure you had an open line of credit with a sufficient credit limit to dip into while you’re in the emergency room, mechanics shop, etc. You’d want to make sure that you had enough lead time on the payment of that debt to get to the 401k funds, and understand the tax implications.

A final thought here - there’s a temptation to see “emergency” savings as something you _might_ use, but I think for most folks (especially those with families) emergency funds are something they WILL use at some point (life happens, and it’s expensive) - so they need to be saving in addition to retirement planning. If your retirement plan explicitly includes the notion of looting the 401k at some point, then that might work for you - but for most people viewing a retirement account as emergency savings is dangerous because it leaves them under saving for inevitable bumps in the road.

I think the logic here is that you don’t want to rob your future self to cover your current self’s emergency. Imagine a prolonged expensive period (car breaks, then you get sick, then you need funds to help a desperate relative, etc.) - you need extra money over a period of months but you don’t have it coming in current cash flows. When you borrow from the 401k you have to pay it back, which you won’t be able to do right away, and once you can, your disposable income goes down (because you’ve got to make those payback payments now). While you are paying back you are missing investment growth. I think of liquid emergency funds (in both personal, and business contexts) as insurance - how much you need is defined by your risk tolerance, asset mix, and long term goals, but the answer almost never “none”.

Another thing to think about is increasing monthly disposable income with emergency deferment of payments - in this context stopping 401k contributions while you deal with an emergency. Depending on your debt type, debt load, and credit history you can often negotiate deferment on many monthly payments for months at a time (e.g. mortgage, student loans, some car payments, utility bills, etc.).

Rest assured when it leaves the garage Google will buy it up and kill it too.

The robot arm part of this reminds me so much of StorageTek’s tape drive robots. Man those were so cool to watch wizzing around in their giant tubes grabbing and loading tape drives on demand.

For a buddy’s 40th we contacted as many of his friends and family as we could find, and asked them to make a short video telling a joke/story/greeting for him. Then we hired some of his favorite TV show stars to do the same via Cameo - Billy D. Williams was hilarious! We stitched it all together in iMovie and surprised him with it.

We got folks he hadn’t seen in a decade to say hi. We got poetry, jokes, even videos with painting people made him. His dad drove to their old neighborhood and took him on a short walking tour. We got his mom to give us pictures of him as a kid to cut in (gotta include that ubiquitous tub shot!).

When we showed it to him and we recorded his reaction and set that as a screen-in-screen video back to everyone who contributed, and couldn’t come to the party (darn COVID!).

It was a big lift - lots of coordination - but as you get older, old friends are harder see and older relatives begin to pass. That video lasts forever, which is cool.

I won't read articles on cybersecurity if I don't see a either a bad guy in a hoodie hunched over a laptop, or (even better) a neon blue padlock in front of a Matrix style screen saver. Those are the dead give-away that an article is worth your time, otherwise it's really anybody's guess as to the content quality.

One thing that is lost with online v. physical print papers is the story breaks (…continue on A5…) and the folds. I get the physical paper and skim the headlines above the fold - I promise myself I will only finish a story (continue on …) if the story impacts me personally in some tangible way.

Another tip - I read geographically close to far. So start with hyper locally news, then metro news, then state/province news, then national/international. As in most democracies and communities, my vote and efforts matter a lot more locally, so being up on the local politics and happenings better informs real life actions I can take to help.

It’s about instituting a level of messaging to shift culture and promote authentic photos - not build fool-proof security.