5,401 karma · joined September 19, 2016
Aside from that my wife and I have a small 5 acre "farmette" in the Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri that we putter around on. We have two mini-burros, 3 dogs, 5 cats, around 30 chickens, thousands of acres of National forest and public land surrounding us, and a lot of wild critters that come visit us.
I have the basement to myself to design and build apps and tinker with things that peak my interest.
I get the feeling the person who wrote that has never actually seen the Mississippi River. It's far from a clear mountain stream you'd walk up to and sip water from. It's not something you'd even want to swim in on a hot day.
It was, and still is, plain old stupid to build those giant cities in those barren deserts. The idea that we'd all have to pay for pipelines to push that water all those miles feels a bit painful to me now, and the complete lack of any discussion about the environmental impact of doing this very bothersome too.
There are many other issues to consider, like the quality of that Mississippi water. They don't call that river "The Big Muddy" for nothing. And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries.
The total driving distance from New Orleans to Las Vegas is 1,722 miles. I doubt you can route a pipeline in a way that reduces that much. The cost and environmental impact of building one would be enormous.
This plan feels like it was concocted by someone who's never driven from Las Vegas to New Orleans, or spent anytime on or around the Mississippi River. It gets low on water too. There are droughts in the mid-west too.
Truth is there is no good sustainable solution to this problem as it exist. The only reasonable solution is to stop building new homes right now, and look into how to reduce the number that exists because it's obvious they've already overbuilt.
It's hard for me to imagine anyone with a lick of sense taking this seriously, but that's a shortcoming of mine I am well aware of nowadays.
The real reason they put me on those projects is because I didn't complain about it, whereas my fellow workers always complained about it because "that's not what I was hired to do". It wasn't until the owners quit asking them that they thought I was getting to do the all the "fun" work.
The reason I never complained is because I got paid the same no matter if I was sweeping floors or designing a new product.
So my advice it do whatever they ask you to do and do it as best as you can. You do that and you'll become invaluable to them, and when you do you can tell them "You need to start paying me more" and they either will or won't, but they probably will because they'll know it's hard to find someone who jump in to get what they need done without whining about it, like all my fellow employees did.
When he graduated he asked me for a letter of recommendation and I gladly wrote one for him. He used it to apply for a job at a big corporation and they put him to work fixing Y2k issues in their very old software.
I've long since lost touch with him but have no doubt he's done well.
I got some work from it, but I also lost my ass a few times because I didn't charge up front and there was one particular guy who'd tell me after I sent them a solution "I've already got this done".
Since I couldn't review his code I couldn't know if he used my code, but I do suspect he did screw me at least a few times and I had to decline his requests for help after a few too many times of that.
There was also getting up to speed on the real cause of the issue they were having. That can require some time regardless of your proficiency with a particular language.
I think concept is good, but I'm not sure a fixed rate to "Fix this issue" can work out well for both parties all the time.
Those front fenders are so low they're going to get ripped up on curbs and concrete wheelstops in parking lots. If someone crashes head on into that car it would really be ugly.
If you're old enough you might remember "the Dale car"[1] you'd know this is really not much different in design or the hype promoting it.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Motor_Car_Co...
I wasn't worried about it, I figured dang and others were working on it and would have things back online.
I do depend on HN for taking a break from coding though and it was tough not getting my fix on demand :D
I never got into gaming or blow myself. I was much more intrigued with the tech of games than playing them, and it's been amazing to see it progress from Pong to what's out there now.
After all these years I wouldn't say hanging out with friends and drinking a few beers and puffing a few doobies is "worse" than gaming though. Not even a tiny bit worse.
I really can't even imagine a reason why anyone would think that unless we're talking about getting shitfaced drunk and/or stoned, but that's really not much different than someone who's been chugging Mountain Dew and gaming for 24 hours+, and I have seen gamers do that, a lot too, not just a few times.
At that point it's fair to say it's an addictive behavior that's unhealthy.
I know this is a long shot but if you've not tried it it's worth a shot..
Buy some quality local raw honey and start taking a couple teaspoons a day. You should know in a couple weeks if it's helping.
I had been dealing with severe shoulder pain for close to a year when an old friend told to try raw honey. I was hurting bad enough to give it a shot. It worked, and it didn't take long compared to how long I'd been hurting.
Since then I've told two friends of mine about it who told me were dealing pain, one was just two weeks from surgery for it. It worked for both of them too.
You might also look into getting some Manuka honey. The antibacterial properties are a bit different than local honey so if local doesn't work that might.
I can tell you it worked for the three of us.
She had no interest at all in learning how to code or gaming but she loved helping in the garden and in the kitchen prepping and cooking meals.
When she got to Jr. High she wanted to join the "Cheerleader" squad so there were a lot early morning rides to school I had to make, and lot's of Basketball games I attended until she graduated, but I had a lot fun cheering along with them.
During those years I setup a campsite on our property so her and her friends could go hang out there. I'm sure they had more fun than most parents would approve of but they never got into any real trouble, the police were never called, and no one got hurt bad enough for the parents to call me. For the most part all those parents knew exactly where their kids were and what they were doing. And that I was close enough to deal with anything that came up. But there were never any serious issues.
She's 37 years old now, still loves to hike, backpack, swim, fish, garden, and cook, and most important, she still likes to hang out with me!
After the first time when users call for help they know they're going to talk to me and that I'll go click by click with them to get them up to speed or reproduce the issue they're experiencing, and that I'll address any issues they run into.
Truth is, I very seldom get calls for help, or bug reports, or suggestions for new features. I have a "News" page where I post what I'm working on, and a "Beta" app they can check out to test new features and check out design changes.
I develop on an Mac Mini and mostly use BBEdit, Fetch, and Firefox/Brave. Over those 20 years I've had to call BBEdit and Fetch for help a few times and their support has always been top notch. I doubt they have many employees or get many support calls. Their software is mature and does what it's supposed to do.
I've also tried to get support from Apple, Google, and Microsoft on occasion over the years and it's close to impossible to talk to anyone. The one time I talked to someone at Google about an Adwords account they were rude and worthless (that was close to 20 years ago). I don't recall ever talking to a person at the others, but I recall feeling lost when searching for help on their websites.
I reported an issue to the Opera web browser folks earlier this year. They didn't respond at all. They did fix the issue, but never made any announcement about it. That bothered me enough to download Brave and I've been using it since to test my work. I don't know that they'd be any better, but I haven't had an issue with their browser to worry about.
I have a "one strike and your out" approach to apps and services I use.
I've always blamed that on the adapters and cable connectors and, of course, Apple's bullshit proprietary connectors. It's really only been slightly annoying though.
But I only paid about $550 for my Mac Mini. I'd be very pissed if that was the case with a brand new 4k Mac Studio rig.
When I was a teen I watched my friends having contest to see who could take the biggest bong hits and "press" them the longest without coughing. I always declined to participate in those contests. I was well known to be a "lightweight", but that moniker never bothered me.
Those who called me that were the same kids who'd chug whiskey they stole from their parents and then hug toilets while puking until they passed out on the bathroom floor.
Edibles are akin to taking pills. You don't know how hard they're going to hit you until they do, and if it's too hard you're stuck with it until it wears off.
Vapes are akin to big bong hits. When I was a teen I saw teens puke after taking a few too many giant bong hits. They were having bong hit competitions.
It's very easy to regulate the effects of weed by taking a tiny puff and putting it down for a few minutes.
So, it's not that weed is more potent. It's easy to sip a bit of whiskey too, but you can get just as puking drunk guzzling beer as slamming shots.
But that's not really a measure for rather we're "desensitized", and maybe that's the wrong word for what I feel about this.
Basically, I can't imagine how consuming violent movies, games, images, music, does not affect oneself. I don't necessarily think that makes one prone to violence, but I do feel it may move them towards depression.
When I was in my early teens I started working for a few small businesses that made mods to vans for people in wheelchairs to drive. I built and installed those as instructed without question.
By the time I was in my late teens I realized there were some dangerous flaws in some of the things we were doing and began pointing them out. For the most part when I did that the design was modified to address the flaw, but one time involved more than just a tweak and would've been costly and I was told "You're not qualified to evaluate this", and that was true in as much as I had no degree in engineering.
What I did have by then was years of experience with how things break and fail.
One example is a company I subcontracted work for had a design for a device that moved the driver's seat in a van backwards about two feet on a set of rails so a paraplegic could slide from the wheelchair to the drivers seat, and then move the seat forward towards the driver's controls. They wanted me to build and install them.
They used a rack gear and power window motor for a car to do this. The rack gear was made of steel, but the power window motor gear was made of plastic and cheap cast aluminum, and that plastic gear was all that was holding the driver's seat in place.
They had no kind of latch at all to hold the seat in the driver's position so it was obvious that in a rear end collision the window motor gear and housing would break and the driver would be slammed backwards about 2.5 ft and then again forwards again with great force.
They really did not want to know that, and refused to make any changes to the design. So I told the State inspector about it a few weeks later when he came to inspect a van that was finished for a client. Even though it was very simple he had no idea of how that device even worked, and told me so. So he went to the CEO of the company and told them about what I'd told him and I was fired.
They went broke less than a year later so as far as I know there were never many of those shipped.
So I also never watch "slasher" movies/TV, or read books that depict graphic violence/gore.
I'm not squeamish, I have raised, slaughtered, and dressed livestock since I was a teen. That's never been a source of "fun" for me though. It has a real life purpose and the end result has always been a much improved source of food for my family and I.
I seldom watch anything on TV that has any violence at all and to be honest I'm a bit leery of those who go out of their way, like to a movie theater, to see it. I'm 62 and this something I've done since a was a teen.
I just don't want those images in my memory. I've never looked into it but my gut feeling is they desensitize us. Looking at the current state of the obsession with owning arms designed specifically to murder humans compared to when I was growing up, I think there is ample proof of that.
Since then when I click on a link to an Instagram post shared on FB they blocked me and demand I set up an account. But if I use a different web browser I can view those posts.
I rarely do that though. I just cannot give them the hit.
The political examples you give are valid, but couldn't gold (for example) work as well to fund Wikileaks?
At some point you need to convert any currency to goods or services so to me the real value of a currency like this would be it's stability of value, but it apparently lacks that.
It seems the lack of a "centrally controlled system" is what makes it so vulnerable to wild swings in real value.
I certainly agree it would be great to have a way to spend and send and receive money without paying a 3rd party a fee, but to do that Bitcoin would need a stable valuation.
From where I sit it appears to have been used as a sort of pyramid scheme. I can accept that's not connected to the intent of the concept, but that is no small part of the reality of it now.
Lacking any way to manage the volatility of value it seems it's either never going to work or it's value must be tied to something tangible, like gold in a vault. But it's not. It's apparently tied to whatever an "investor" might be willing to pay.
The only real value I can see in it is the cost of the computing time it took to run the algorithm to create a bitcoin. The leap from that to trading the result of the output for an ounce of gold or bushel of wheat is where I get disconnected.
If I can convince someone my bitcoin has real value and they trade me a bushel of wheat for it, why would the bitcoin have any value to anyone else? I can see where you might avoid paying a tax or a banking fee but you still have nothing more than a digital file.
I can certainly see how hyping "Bitcoin" could create the illusion of value and that could create a rising market for it, but at some point all you really own is a bit of code that has no real value on it's own. No government that will give you their issued currency for it.
No one likes paying taxes but we do like good roads and safe schools, etc. So if the concept is purely to avoid paying taxes we need to figure out how to tax bitcoin transactions to fund those public services.
The conversation on that previous post did answer my questions and I learned a lot more.
That's stunning. To be honest, I've still have never understood the real value of "crypto currencies" outside of hiding cash transfers from taxes or purchases that are criminal in some way.
I've yet to find an article that clearly and simply explains the need or reasoning for using it. I've seen a few that speaks to it being "secure" but that's obviously not the case because I've seen far more that describe how people have been ripped off and far more than those I've seen about those who've had money just disappear from a Bank or S&L.
We get lots of folks coming here to hike and camp and backpack in the Summer months, but most locals don't. We go to creeks and streams and lakes and hang out on the rocky banks and gravel bars and swim, boat, canoe (float trips), and if we camp out we set up our tents on those rocky banks.
I (and most everyone I know here) treat clothes I wear when working outside with permethrin. I spray my shoes, socks, denim jeans, and T-shirts. Those will last at least a month and a couple washings.
We also do "Tick Checks" when we get inside after being outdoors. We do get out, most of us live in forested areas and we have gardens and lawns to tend to, so we do get bit, there's no getting around it, but we get those ticks off fast. I've never had an engorged tick on me.
And I treat my clothes when I go hiking, camping, and backpacking in the cool season too (Late Nov - Mid-March), but the ticks are not near as bad then.
So, those practices likely also have to do with why very few locals get Lyme.
I have a hard time with complaining about free software. I either use it or don't, but I won't complain about it.
So then I tried embedding the css in the email and same thing. Thunderbird rendered it perfectly and the others ignored and/or removed it. I'm at a loss as to why CSS in an email is ignored or stripped out by Gmail. Sure makes it ugly though.