deltarholamda

True enough, but those are technological solutions to a social problem. E.g., if the public transportation is terrible because it's dangerous or you get hassled on it, people don't use it.

The guy sitting in a 4 hour commute every day is doing it for a reason. It's a cost he's willing to pay for some benefit.

Another possibility is that the uber-rich techbros can see that, if we keep heading the way we're going, the whole thing comes crashing down. We've been speedrunning a far-left utopia for quite a while now, and it's not going well. Whether it's some kind of currency collapse, internal civil war, or something else, this is a death slide towards something bad.

Assuming that's the explanation, then radical change isn't surprising. How radical can be argued, but turning the rudder on the ship of state can't be.

I don't care how good emacs is, that function is too long.

PDF is brushing up against "more harm than good". Wish there was a proper alternative.

"If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed." -- Col. Jack O'Neill (with 2 Ls)

>“DEI exists” isn’t an argument.

But it is. DEI indicates ideological capture. Whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, it's not germane to the purported goals of "advancing science/health/military readiness/etc". At best it's tangential.

If we were a robust and wealthy country, then perhaps we could engage in these sorts of boutique social experiments. But we are not. We've got serious problems on multiple fronts. Fixing it before it all goes blooey means serious disruption, and we're now well into 30 years of positive reinforcement on the ideological capture. You're not going to get the results you need from the people who benefitted from the previous mismanagement. Trump learned that lesson quite directly the last time he was in office.

>intentionally have an inefficient economy

Yes, but the economy should serve the people. The people do not serve the economy. Or at least that's the way it should work. Wall Street tends to disagree with this sentiment.

Can a large ship, or any ship, intercept a hypersonic missile? Because that's the reality of today.

There isn't much rule of law left.

Think something should be illegal? It's probably in there somewhere. Want to do it anyway? It's probably allowed somewhere else. Want to know if you can or can't do something? Well, good luck figuring that out. With enough time spent in lines talking to civil service workers you can get an answer that may be correct. Or maybe not. Probably best to hire a lawyer at hundreds of dollars an hour to tell you whether you can or not. (The lawyer will say "no", because if he says "yes" and is wrong, now he's in trouble, and nobody wants that.)

The system has grown and changed and mutated, and now it's a behemoth that nobody really understands. It's such a mess that people are genuinely hopeful that an AI will ride in and help us all untangle all that we humans did.

And the people that we've put in charge of doing all of this are collectively the most unaccountable folks ever. They routinely skirt, side-step, or ignore the rule of law as they see fit, and they still enjoy a 90%+ re-election rate and an incredibly high barrier to entry for reformers.

I'm not completely opposed, but the ones that seem to be worth the effort are still very expensive. The advantage of the flip phone is that it is cheap and durable.

If I need something more robust, I have a laptop. If the flip phone can get me decent internet, I'm good. And if I need something like map directions while I'm driving, well, I can keep my iPhone and just connect it to WiFi.

My partner got the "you must download iOS 18.3, it has security fixes!" message, and did so.

It defaults to Apple Intelligence "on", which they had already declined in the last update. So, turned it off in settings. Then discovered they had to turn it off in each app that uses it individually.

That is not good, Apple. Terrible UX.

All the other changes were just as big of a hit. Mail went wonky (the Categories view is not great). The iMessage apps list is now gigantic and many of them you can't turn off, only reorder.

Honestly, this Wall Street-influenced AI goldrush is getting out of hand. Apple used to be better than this. The last updates to iOS did not make the devices better, just different. I'm staying on iOS 17 as long as I can, my feeble iPhone 14 won't do Apple Intelligence anyway, but I also don't want 18 and its changes.

Honestly, I'm about ready to just move to a flip phone. The only feature I really need is a WiFi hotspot.

It is great news. I was not aware this was in the works.

Using other libraries for something as fundamental as this always seemed odd.

>I realize there's some devils in the details here with regards to social pressures and the like.

I have a no-socials policy for my kids until they're practically adults. It's not an easy policy, and the oldest who had to deal with this policy first, was not thrilled about it.

But it did bear fruit. My oldest is at university, and is not entangled in social media drama. Which is not entirely due to my policy--the oldest is also extremely independent--but I can't help but notice it played a part.

It's not easy. Regardless of whether it's a good or bad thing, they definitely miss out on some degree of what makes up the public commons for kids today.

Every now and then there's a story about a (usually) millennial who swears off social media and finds value in doing so. Sometimes they go back, sometimes they don't. But millennials marinated in this world for so long, it's really difficult for them to break out. (At least the Zoomers got "touch grass" pretty early on.) I feel for the millennials trying to navigate through all this. For GenX it would be like making it through the 80s without knowing the lyrics to Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. You almost have to be an extreme outsider or a very independent person indeed to escape the milieu.

Exactly this. Don't think of it as "moving to a service-based economy", think of it as "outsourcing manufacturing and resource extraction". They are two sides of the same coin, but people tend to only look at the one shiny side.

Like any race to the bottom, it works great until you hit the bottom. Only now you don't have any of the fundamental industry, and you've lost all of the domain knowledge of those industries. Short-term thinking is incredibly seductive.

Loggers used to sink logs in water to keep them from rotting. Keeping wood wet is a pretty good preservative.

What gets to wood is critters. A lot of sea creatures will nibble away at it. On land, it's insects and fungus and the like. Tidal action will also scour away exposed wood.

>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.

It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.

For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.

As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.

That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"

The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.

It takes more effort to homeschool than farming it out to public schools, so you're naturally selecting for involved parents. To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted.

It also skews the perspectives of homeschool parents into thinking "this is the best system, why doesn't everybody do it?" The answer is, of course, to take the good aspects of each system and make the public school system more viable again, but there are too many entrenched interests on both sides for this to be easy.

That you felt the need to explain these makes me feel really, really old. (And you did need to explain it; it's practically Elder Lore at this point.)

It's like explaining to young people that we used to have to pay per message for SMS, or that only one person could be on the Internet at a time at your house.

Now if you'll excuse me, I see some suspicious looking clouds I need to go yell at.

You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.

And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.

(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)

I took the pedals off for one of my kids (the others did the training wheels), and it worked quite well.

The only downside was that he figured out that if he got wobbly, he could stick his legs down and a bit out and it would help him stabilize by lowering the center of gravity. That seemed great at the time, but when the pedals were put back on, he would still use this trick when he got wobbly, which isn't a great instinct. Took a bit of time to train that out of him.

But in the end, it was faster than the training wheels, and it's cheaper than buying a specialized balance bike.

Second this suggestion. The one by Caroline Alexander is also very good.

It's a story of the most incredible leadership during spectacular difficulty overcoming multiple seemingly impossible things.

My kids do mountain bike racing, and one of the reasons I like they do it is because it is incredibly safe. For one, where I am there aren't "mountains"; it's essentially off-road biking. But additionally, the organization they race in is emphatic about safety. The worst injuries done is to dad's wallet when a wheel gets bent or a derailleur goes blooey.

The article says it's mostly men with an average age of 35. These are dudes who are pushing their own limits on some of the most difficult terrain. As you say, a radically different profile.

The girlfriend thing was very odd. At one time, "making it" meant now you can marry the girl, have a bunch of kids, and become a pillar of your community.

Get rich? Move to a small or mid-sized city, marry your girl, have some kids, and get involved. Need to be busy? Run a local business that hires locals. Use your money and expertise to improve your community, which is a lot easier to do as a big fish in a small pond.

Name fields in general.

But sometimes I don't have control, e.g. another person is inputting the data and dutifully duplicates my name. That's how I ended up with the 2 phone calls/3 person situation, which happened about a month ago.

Hell, my driver's license is missing the apostrophe because the system doesn't accept it.

When somebody is trying to find me in a computer there's a whole litany of things they have to try, including assuming "First O'Lastame" got bashed into "First O. Lastname".

I think about this every time I read an article extolling the wonders of technology.

>Not as bad as when I was once issued a first.o'last@corp email address though

Oh, man, that happened to me too, way back in the late 90s. I had forgotten about that.

It broke things all over the place. Even now you run into the occasional validator that is convinced that the plus sign is not valid in email addresses.

My last name has an apostrophe in it. This isn't super weird or anything, there have been "O'Haras" and "O'Neills" (with 2 Ls) forever.

And yet whenever I deal with a computer system I don't put the apostrophe in because even in 2024 it is completely jacked up. Sometimes it's just disallowed. Sometimes I get "\\'" showing up. Sometimes I get "'". I've seen "’". One time, one system accepted it, but another system that accessed the same data didn't allow apostrophes so the person using the second system couldn't access the record, and it took 2 phone calls and 3 people to come up with a workaround.

It doesn't work often enough that I don't even try anymore. There are just too many opportunities for it to get forgotten or handled improperly from all directions.

I was at an event recently, with a bunch of teenagers (one of which was mine) and I passed around a couple of those Fuji Instax cameras.

They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them.

For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go.

For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.

"Do They Know It's Christmas" usually makes the lists of terrible Christmas music as well.

So much Christmas music is repetitive, but coloring outside the lines is a tough thing to do with Christmas music. The Pogues nailed it with "Fairytale of New York", but it largely appeals only to GenX and younger.

I didn't know Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to this song. Man, that's gotta sting.

But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.

Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.

Well, sure, specific cases are different. But, FWIW, I did it with regular conference calls.

Infants aren't much of a distraction IMO. My cats were more distracting, at least until the baby got mobile. That stage is certainly more challenging.