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fowksweon Lead Mines of Galena, Kansas

I grew up in Joplin, MO which is part of this mining area. The remnants of that industry have left this region highly polluted. Much of the soil in these towns is contaminated and some places like Picher, OK have been declared superfund sites. Picher is a ghost town now, completely abandoned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma

The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.

The mines themselves were sometimes filled with water which became swimming holes.

Joplin has a decent sized population (50k) so much remediation has happend over the decades. Our lawn and many others in town were stripped down several inches and replaced. The chat piles mysteriously disappeared one year and the swimming holes have been filled.

Myself and my father have always complained of having memory issues. It could be genetic but I’m convinced it’s lead poisoning.

fowksweon Cache Monet

The track is Jib Kidder Windowdipper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwAYU4rlwmA

fowksweon Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

> We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work.

This isn’t Denver-specific at all. It’s how every US city was built.

For ~100 years we planned cities around one assumption: work happens in a centralized office, five days a week. Transit, zoning, downtown land use, parking, even tax bases were optimized for the daily commute. Downtowns became office monocultures; neighborhoods became places you slept.

Remote work broke that model. The result is cities that are now unfortunately organized around a behavior that no longer dominates daily life - and we’re still trying to operate them as if it does.

fowksweon Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

All those guys. Also, the daily visits to lnkedup.com k10k.net, designiskinky.com, newstoday.com were so influential and informative to me (wow, just did an archive.org lookup of some of those and got a nostalgic chill - https://web.archive.org/web/20050303092717if_/http://www.lin...).

fowksweon Pivotal Tracker will shut down

+1 for linear.app. It's somewhat similar in feel to PT. It's very responsive and has vim style key bindings. We switched a year ago and haven't looked back.

fowksweon Ask HN: Is a masters in ML worth it?

This is a great point and I think the crux of it is - is ML going to be like the last crypto 'boom'?

I don't think it is. Investment is being made at an institutional level in a way that was not happening for crypto.

We are deep in the midst of the hype cycle right now, but if the hype pans out, ML will have a transformative effect on the tech market (or world for that matter) akin to the internet itself. In that scenario, ML expertise at any level will be a golden ticket.

fowksweon Web design inspiration catalog

Linkedup, Design is Kinky, News Today. I miss those days of the web.

fowksweon California Forever

Not quite: https://www.calculateme.com/area/acres/to-square-miles/50000

fowksweon Webvan: The dotcom bubble’s biggest bust

They are going for some serious coin on ebay!

fowksweon Webvan: The dotcom bubble’s biggest bust

They used to deliver your groceries in these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan#/media/File:Webvan_tubs...) tubs, leaving the tub with you. You were free to keep them if you wanted. I had several for years which served as the best moving boxes I've ever had.

kozmo.com (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com) was another one that was ahead of its time.

fowksweon Most in U.S. (57%) prefer big houses, even if amenities farther away

Does this need a citation? The car is the thing that brings the pollution. You live in the burbs, you drive the car, you pollute. You live in the city, you walk/bike/transit, you pollute less.

fowksweon Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world

There is a lot in this piece taken from Boom, but this article paints GoGo in a much worse light. It more or less says he's unscrupulous when it comes to the source of money (Russian Oligarch's) being used to buy art. It also makes him out to be a shadowy market maker, representing both sides of a transaction where neither buyer nor seller know who each other are.

fowksweon Geography of Kansas (2022)

Thanks for this - what a great find this evening!

fowksweon I splurged for the fanciest dishwasher and it was worth it

I've owned and sold several homes that I've renovated and they always fetch a premium.

Recently I sold an apartment in a complex with 1200 units - so comps are widely available. The sale happened in a matter of hours with 6 way-over-ask offers, half of which were all cash. The closing price continues to be a high water mark for this unit / line in the complex.

There were other units on the market at the same time as us where the sale took weeks if not months and sold for drastically less. Some of them were recently renovated, but had builder grade finishes.

High end kitchen / bathroom renovations (aka appliances) are most certainly a major factor.

fowksweon I splurged for the fanciest dishwasher and it was worth it

Here in the US, luxury appliances are what sell houses. Usually the investment pays handsomly when you go to sell.

fowksweon Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

I'll admit it has been 3 years since we considered moving there (we tried living for a month to get the feel of it), but I wonder how well suburban style development is going to scale for utilitarian cycling to occur. The population is what, maybe 100k now? What about when its 10x that? (think DFW)

fowksweon Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

Bentonville's core is vastly different from the surrounding suburb/exurb/metro area which is mostly 0.5+ acre lots built in confined subdivisions connected via 4-8 lane arterial stroads - typical American car style suburban planning. The damage is done, retrofitting this development pattern to suit cycling over F150 throughput is just not something that will be achievable in the Bentonville, or the greater US.

I live in Kansas City and there is a valiant effort happening here to put in meaningful cycling infrastructure. There are bollard protected lanes from downtown out to the inner ring suburbs, additionally we have a residential grid that would allow safe cycling around town, but the new lanes are going completely unused. Visit the KC reddit and look at the vitriol being spewed - 'why are my tax dollars being wasted on this', 'i cant park', 'it ruins business'... These are the people coming from our outer ring suburbs where cycling is just not an option - they can't even fathom a place without cars.

fowksweon Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

The market was rigged by oil and auto before cars were climate controlled.

fowksweon Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

> * To overtake a slower vehicle, the Megane and i4 are better : simply push the left blinker, then the car switch lanes and accelerates BEFORE having entirely switched lane, like a human driver would do.

Teslas do this in FSD mode.

fowksweon Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

The market is rigged by an industry(ies) (auto, oil) to develop society in its favor. Without a major 'refactor', the US doesn't have a chance at efficient urban design that would support individual use transport.

fowksweon Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research

Michael Pollan said it best: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

fowksweon I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)

> And now what?

If you haven't already, I highly suggest making a child if you can. It seems to snap all of this into focus - it did for me anyway.

I mean I still have a ton of existential dread and still often wonder what the point is but I do find purpose in providing for my family and trying to raise a human that can do good - maybe better than me and the author of that NYer piece :D.

fowksweon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)

UserEvidence | Full stack Rails | Fulltime | Kansas City, Nashville, Jackson, WY and/or Remote

https://www.userevidence.com/ is B2B SaaS in the martech / sales enablement space.

Hi, I'm the CTO at UserEvidence and we are looking to hire our 2nd engineer. I'm based in KC, one Founder in Nashville and another in Jackson, WY. We are obviously remote first but have office space in all 3 places and would love to have some IRL interaction from time to time after these past 2 years.

Full JD here: https://www.notion.so/userevidence/UserEvidence-Full-Stack-R...

A few interesting bullet points from it:

- Stack: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Vue, Sidekiq, Elasticsearch, Puppeteer, Nuxt, Heroku

- Regular off site trips - we just had our first one in Jackson, WY 2 weeks ago

- Large equity stake + competitive salary + benefits

- Founders’ first company acquired for $90M+

Feel free to reach out directly to our CEO, Evan Huck if interested: evan@userevidence.com

Thanks!

fowksweon Lumber rally cools with transport snarls easing, buyers balking

$20 is the new five

fowksweon Food Packaging

Can someone please focus the same amount of energy that was put into making this visualization into figuring out how to abolish plastic in general?

fowksweon Demand for ornamental plants is ravaging South Africa’s rare desert flora

Garden centers and dedicated plant stores in the US are just as guilty of bad behavior. The fame Instagram has given to succulents has bred a huge demand for cacti which is leading proprietors of these operations to raid the desert for all kinds of varieties.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/20/to-catch...

fowksweon How I learned French in 12 months (2020)

Do you mind sharing your age? Curious if youth played a part here - I'm in my 40s and wondering if I'll have as much success?

fowksweon Startup tooling: our product management, sales, and marketing stack

I agree on the GSuite experience, but you can use Zoom in the browser FWIW. You have to not click 'open zoom app' to get the option to do so.

fowksweon The Great Siberian Thaw

The New Yorker's climate coverage is fantastic and terrifying. Look for articles by Elizabeth Kolbert, particularly the one's she did back in '05 - The Climate of Man I, II and III