408 karma · joined February 28, 2017
It's the same principle as not requiring unpaid overtime to get ahead etc. The government sets a regulatory framework, and businesses have to compete within the rules.
Women are still paid less than men, and hold fewer positions of power in politics or business. They still far outnumber men as victims of sexual assault. They are still expected to carry the burden of unpaid domestic work and care.
If women as a whole are achieving more than men, despite the disadvantages they still suffer, then good on them. That funding should be going towards educating men so that women can walk down a street at night without a completely reasonable fear of violence.
The tone of the article comes off uncomfortably close to the whole incel thing.
It's not always as convenient in the moment, but I find it has a positive effect on my relationships and mental health, and it saves me a bunch of money. And I have actual free time to spend on doing stuff like learning to play the piano.
Once you train yourself to recognize it, it's really scary - so many things in our modern lives are explicit traps - for a few moments of convenience (always made very easy), you burden your future self with a non-negligible amount of future work and entrust private details of your life to companies with a poor track record of keeping that data safe. So many things take only a few clicks to sign up, then you have to spend possibly hours on the phone later trying to cancel an account.
* Fairly durable * A security violation requires physical access to the paper storage * Flexibility - you can take a pen and draw anywhere on paper - and it will make sense to other readers without having to write custom software * Flexibility 2 - you can organize bits of paper any way you like
Having had my identity compromised through third parties (Premera, Experian), the security aspects are particularly compelling.
It also feels like a lot of the business innovation credited to software could have been possible using paper systems, e.g. reading about the Toyota Production System, it seemed more about process innovation than anything to do with software.
I think there's interesting research and ideas to find in this area, that could lead to a productivity boost. One example idea (I'm sure there are better ones) would be allowing simultaneous use of multiple versions of a library. E.g. This dependency I'm consuming uses CommonLibrary-1.2, and this other dependency uses CommonLibrary-2.4, but they can both get along just fine without having to find some combination both dependencies can agree on.
I guess the customer support horror I went through when they canceled my phone number out of the blue in Google Fi is also factored into that decision (took two months to get my phone number back), but to be fair, that wasn't an issue with their hardware.
Once you get used to it, Smalltalk is really the most amazing development environment. It's hard to describe how it feels to work with live objects - it's an incredible speed boost, because instead of grepping logs or stepping through code, you just interact with the objects directly, you can examine the state of instance variables, add new methods, or change code while the code is running. The feedback loop is so short, you get amazing productivity.
There's a great video floating around somewhere of someone debugging an Asteroids game while the game is running.
From what I've read, the downside is that working on larger programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more communication to keep the code base consistent and structured.
The toilet paper is made from bamboo, and comes wrapped in paper in a cardboard box. They operate in USA, Australia, and the UK.
You might get some benefits from a suitable climate moving into a fertile area, but equally you could get disastrous impacts from a suitable climate moving away from a fertile area.
You can see the impact of increased intensity of weather events on food availability already, for example, the horseradish crop failure this year means Burger King is out of Zesty Onion Dip until spring: https://dailygreenworld.com/2019/11/22/earth-changes/climate...
My (limited) opinion, is that auto-centric opponents want dense, walkable, cyclable cities. That doesn't imply towering skyscrapers, six stories of apartments with mixed retail, office, and light industry are sufficient. That should provide enough density to make public transit a viable option, if road space is reclaimed from cars.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/16/urban-living-...
There was also the General Motors street car conspiracy[2], which saw car companies buy up privatized public transit only to run it into the ground.
The fight against this future being imposed is also fascinating reading, particularly the work of Jane Jacobs[3]. She correctly saw past the hyperbole to the unfortunate consequences, fought against the vision but lost.
The reason not much infrastructure is being built these days is simply that cities are running out of money and credit. Every road built comes with a price tag for building it, and an ongoing price tag for maintaining it. The building price was so often done on credit (bonds), but the maintenance price is usually not considered. Given that roads bring in basically zero income for a city, every road built comes with an obligation for the city but no way to pay for it. In the past credit was issued on the assumption that future growth would somehow provide some payback, but after 50 years cities have hit the growth limits and still not seen any payback. Strong Towns[4] is an excellent book on the subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [3] https://shelterforce.org/2016/05/10/jane-jacobs-defender-of-... [4] https://www.strongtowns.org/book
Even if there are other, larger, causes of death, that still doesn't make it irrational to want a city where one major cause of death for children has been eliminated. Especially when the cause of death in question is something as unnecessary as using a car to move around a city.
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi... [2] https://www.nsc.org/driveithome
We've also started bringing more things into our local area, walking more, and using public transit. We've cut our gas usage by 75%, saving roughly $2,500/year.
We consume less, buying secondhand where possible, aiming for quality, or just evaluating whether you really need something.
We're eating less meat and more beans. I was vegan once for a two-year period, I won't go back there - I don't believe a 100% vegan diet is a good idea. However, it is important to reduce meat consumption (majority vegetarian diet is the goal), and we make sure 100% of our meat is purchased from a small local farm using sustainable and humane practices. I'm really interested in entomophagy and will take any chance to eat insects I can find.
I live in Seattle so my electricity is nearly 100% emission free, and I pay for the green option to offset another home's electricity somewhere in Washington.
Lastly, we've stopped flying for vacations. There's plenty to enjoy in the local area.
Things still to be improved: my car, a Jeep Liberty, is an awful gas-guzzler. The next car will be electric (or better yet, no car).
I'm keen to start an urban farm with aquaponics and insect farming.
I will keep advocating for safer streets so that it's a viable option for more people to move around cities without a car.
I'm saving money to buy some degraded agricultural land someday and restore it.
Climate change will bring increased intensity to weather events going forward (hurricanes, fires). It's too late to avoid some of that (e.g. Australia). I think our globalized society is actually very fragile and susceptible to disruption, so focusing on local resiliency will matter more into the future. I'll be looking at food security, water storage for extended droughts, and building in resistance to weather events like high winds and fires.
Uncle Bob also has a video series that provides a good introduction to a bunch of design issues in an understandable format (but it's not cheap at $14/video): https://cleancoders.com/ . I've seen these videos transform the way teams code.
My other suggestion is to start paying attention to how your code "feels". If something is painful/boring/fiddly it's often the case that the design isn't a good fit for what you're trying to do. TDD is excellent for this because it will move the pain front and center where you can't ignore it.
Clean code and other resources will give you tools to use when the design isn't a good fit (I could use this technique here etc...), but recognizing when you need to step back and change the design will be up to you.
The GPL doesn't prevent forks, it doesn't even prevent someone else profiting off the fork, it just requires that the fork can also be shared freely.
With climate change, we're looking at drastic coastline changes over the next 100 years. 100 years is extremely short for cities - it probably takes about that to go from being a town to being a city, if you have excellent growth rates.
To move a city in 100 years is probably flat-out impossible, just for cost reasons alone. Most cities are hard-pressed to pay for maintenance of roads and essential services, and service their already crushing debt levels. City governments are not going to manage it, which means the citizens of the cities are going to shoulder the costs. We're going to see large-scale financial hardship in coastal cities going forward, and multiple cities going bankrupt and into decline.
[1] https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ancient-seas/sea-level-ris...
Having cities that require a car to participate in social life is hugely inefficient in terms of energy expenditure, public spending on infrastructure (e.g in the article the yearly expenditure on bike infrastructure is 500 million euros, that's probably about the cost of replacing one bridge made for cars), and also disproportionately impacts poor people, for whom car ownership can be a real financial burden.
Higher densities of people make many things more efficient, e.g. shared heating in apartment building, making mass transit viable, sharing resources like food and water. Climate change is forcing our hand on transitioning to a higher-efficiency society, but we would have to do it soon anyway because we are running out of oil. When you can't enjoy the energy density of fossil fuels, efficiency will start to matter a whole lot more. Our current mode where a single person might travel up to 50 or 100 miles every day, just to live their life, is a ridiculously inefficient way of spending your time on Earth.
Secondly, habitat loss is the single greatest cause of the mass extinction of species we are currently experiencing. Most of that is agriculture, but urban sprawl certainly plays a big part. If we want to enjoy, you know, other species existing, we should be looking for ways to reduce the amount of land we need to occupy as humans.
Also, a bonus: kids that grow up in walkable neighborhoods have been shown to have the highest levels of upward economic mobility. So really if you want to do right by your kids, you should be moving to a walkable area and reducing your car use.