mitchellst

The Trek 500.

It's a bicycle. It's a steel bicycle, which is out of favor these days, but Trek still makes a few each year. And they haven't really changed the design since it was introduced in the 80's. Why? Because it's the perfect bicycle.

At least, if you're doing a very particular thing. I rode one from the Oregon Coast to Long Island. It was an unsupported tour, so I had about 50 pounds of gear strapped to it the whole way. While my companions suffered various breakdowns and issues, the 500 was rock solid. It doesn't get fancy on components-- no disk breaks or electronic shifting. Everything on it can be easily repaired, removed, or replaced with your two hands and a compact multi-tool. The steel frame will stand up to any manner of abuse. Hearing about the whole tough-as-nails thing, you assume it won't be that pleasing to ride. You assume wrong.

I've seen many people get this excited about pencils. Does anyone else remember Milton Friedman's extended love song to the invisible hand and the pencil?

Yes, you can do this. But, what about a staging environment? How do you keep data and code in sync between environments? My company runs a lot of wordpress instances, and we've wound up shipping most of them to Pantheon. (pantheon.io) Not only does it take care of environment issues, but it gives you redis and implements caching as a service. As the post says, wordpress fights AWS a bit. We leave it to the people who are experts at winning that fight.

(I know this reads like an ad. I'm not affiliated with pantheon except as a user. Pantheon comes close to making wordpress not suck.)

Just saying, "Collaborating" was a very poor choice of words.

Yep, UChicago alum here, too. It's a weak argument anywhere to claim we should limit free speech simply because most students attend universities for job training, not for intellectual enrichment. But it's an epic fail of an argument at Chicago. The school year opens with an address to the first years from a faculty member on "The Aims of Education." UC is not a lunch counter where students order things to their liking. Rather, the institution sits you down and tells you why you are there. You are encouraged to expand on their thoughts, but never to shirk the responsibilities the University puts on you.