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Problem patched, more or less: you can easily forget or loose the dongle, and you’ve lost the ability to charge your phone at the same time. It still feels like a step back in functionality.

Headphones meant for audio production tend to come with a 3.5mm headphone jack with screw thread that allows you to securely fit an adapter to full size jack.

I find it very likely that people who are into audio production want to use their cabled headphones on their phone. I do. And the people who are into hi-fi too. It’s just that it’s too small of a part of the market.

I’ve bitten the bullet, but using an adapter is still suboptimal in two ways:

- you can’t charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.

- it’s really easy to loose the adapter, especially if you use your headphones on other devices that still have the jack.

I keep hearing this reference on how most (80%?) of women compete for the 20% of men, it just doesn’t make sense to me. It can only be true in a narrow sense… i.e. on a specific dating app 20% of men get messaged by 80% of women (that’s where the figure comes from IIRC?).

But looking at the larger picture of how relationships are formed, there is no way for it to work this way. And if it were true, it would be just as bad for women—as most of them would stay single! These 20% of men might have an easier time on the apps, and casual hookups might be simpler, but they can’t be in relationships with 80% of women. And a committed partnership of two people keeps being the long term vision for most in the dating game.

And people still have relationships. From the US numbers I could find, the bracket with the most singles is males 18-29, at 51%, which is a lot, but not exactly ‘close to doom’.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...

EDT: This 80/20 figure initially came from an OKCupid study, and it’s about perceived attractiveness. In this study, 80% of men are perceived as of less than average attractiveness. However, that did not necessarily stop them from getting messaged. https://archive.ph/ZJymw#selection-600.0-633.275

How do you feel about the ethical aspect? Now the home is not useful, except as an investment to you, but if you sold it there’s lots of ways you could make money instead (and in ways that provide value to others!). And the place would be someone’s home. Seems weird to let it be stay empty like that.

This is so alien to me. Why don’t you sell the place? Staying the owner of this place makes it so that you can’t spend your money tied up in this house, and this house can’t provide its roof to someone. Seems like both of you loose.

Or tolerate squatting, which used to be the case in the Netherlands.

The parent you’re replying too has no problem with tenant-friendly laws: rather, these occupation limits are both tenant and owner unfriendly, because you can’t live together in non-family arrangements that you might prefer (as a tenant or as owner). I sympathize.

With regards to your example, if you’re rich enough to be able to afford leaving a property you own empty, then I have little sympathy. It seems like their cities and states should introduce a sizeable vacancy tax. Or, as they did in Amsterdam in the 1980ies, tolerate squatting. And yes, maybe see if there’s something that can be done about backlogs in eviction court, but the baseline for me is that it should never be feasible for an owner to leave their house empty.

Apparently they went out of fashion everywhere, except the Netherlands, probably because of the strong presence of the ‘FEBO’ franchise from the 1960ies onward, a fast food brand built in part on having these machines. So it’s hardly new to see them in Amsterdam!

Right! In Europe cars with manual transmission remain very common, it allows vendors to sell the automatic version at a higher price point I imagine. At this point I’m not even sure they’re that much cheaper to make. And it’s become a weird experience—you’ll have all these features that make it feel like you’re driving a computer anyway, lane assist etc. And the car tells you when it thinks you should shift gears! I found myself muttering “if you’re so smart, why don’t you do it yourself”.

You can take it as far as you want to—and then you can still get cancer. A healthy lifestyle helps put the odds in your favour, but is no guarantee whatsoever.

> go to Delft for university

Hmm… Well, that only works for degrees in engineering, it’s a ‘Technical University’. Also, Delft is probably a great university, but it doesn’t strike me as more prestigious than the other Universities you mention.

For what it’s worth, the members of the Royal family all attended Leiden University. As did the current prime minister. Most ministers of justice in recent history attended Leiden University and were a member of Minerva, a conservative student society.

Still, I wouldn’t consider Leiden a particularly prestigious university—none of the Dutch universities are, because they are all relatively accessible and publicly funded. Instead, the well-connected manage to create their own little groups inside of student life. Like the aforementioned Minerva, which like other student societies (that exist in Delft as well), has students make small clusters (jaarclub, dispuut), with all kinds of barriers to entry. I presume the richest kids cluster together. People then rely on these connections throughout their career.

To me it sounds like you met a group of rich people who were friends in Delft University (and I presume already rich) and relied on this network afterwards: this is a pattern that reproduces itself at other Universities. And inversely, attending Delft University is by no means a guarantee that you can profit from this mechanism.

It’s interesting what you say of not seeing class differences before, I think it’s quite common in The Netherlands. The image the Dutch have of their society is one with very little class differences. This might be a comforting idea in day to day live (as you mention) but it also makes it hard to do something about the unfair situations that persist.

For sure! It’s just that GP seemed to imply the kind of mosaic shown in he picture to be a tile mosaic, whereas it is not. I agree amazing things are possible in tile mosaics

Right, for these mosaics the fragments that make up the mosaic are cut by hand, each one is different. What are now called mosaic tiles will give a very different result because they make a square grid, more like pixel art. Although there’s historical precedent here too, for instance in square kufic calligraphy!

It’s not uncommon though to see mosaic floors in pre-war European homes, especially in entrance halls, but they tend to be designs specific to the space. After all, copying an existing design requires the same floor dimensions.

In Sevilla, there’s actually a palace where the owner changed the dimensions of the rooms to fit the roman mosaics (originals) they had installed https://visitasevilla.es/en/museum-fine-arts-and-other-place...

New mosaics are rare because labour is more expensive, but for sure they still get made. EDT I’ve always figured that it’d be something fun to commission for new buildings because, old as the medium is, you still have the basic elements of colour and form that should allow contemporary artists to express themselves.

for example here’s a recent mosaic in England by Grayson Pery https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2015/05/A-House-for-Essex_... part of https://www.dezeen.com/2015/05/15/house-for-essex-fat-grayso...

or a Belgian atelier making traditional mosaic floors http://www.mosaicodidue.be/vloeren-nieuw/

I’d be careful with ev-psych explanations. It often reads as trying to find some rational sounding explanation for what are really just social norms. And these norms evolve: in my experiences in the free-for-all of app-enabled dating, attitudes run the gamut for both men and women… you’ll meet women looking for casual sex and men looking for an emotional connection.

If you read artist’s bios, it’ll often say they’re “based in” a certain place. I’ve always found that a bit pretentious, as if artists don’t simply live somewhere, they need a fancier word. But I’m starting to understand it better, I think they mean having a place that you keep gravitating back to, even if your work and live might take you all over the place. And where you can keep your stuff :)

Good luck with finding your model! These last years must have been an enriching experience whichever way.

Thanks, interesting stats. The average length of staying in one place 71 days, still pretty short compared to the norm, living somewhere for a few years to forever. The stats don’t really mention how long people keep up this lifestyle though—only that there were no respondents older than 44!

For me it’s hard to imagine living this way because I like to feel connected to where I live, and that takes more time and investment. And I feel it’s better for where I live, because I can get involved in local initiatives, learn the language etc. But I think that’s a common sentiment, that’s why I wonder about how long people tend to do the nomad thing.

I do know plenty of people who have one place as a kind of base station and often end up working in other places for short periods, that might be a nice hybrid model.

I don’t live in the country where I was born, and neither do most of my friends…still our apartments are full of stuff… trinkets, art, rescued furniture… to me it’s part of what makes me feel at home and what makes it fun to stay with others!

There’s this chastising of owning things (‘the things own you’) that comes up every now and again, but I think that could be reserved for when these objects stop being something you cherish and start to be something you consume: fast fashion, consumer electronics upgrade cycles, etc.

In this article not owning things seems to be a prerequisite for a certain lifestyle of hopping around the world with a laptop, but if that’s your thing, why not simply rent out your apartment? It seems unlikely to be something you’d want to do for years on end. Although I’d be curious to see some data on that, digital nomad churn rate.

At least for designers who also do print, most of them will depend heavily on Illustrator, inDesign and Acrobat. And since you buy these programs in a package, you’ll also get Photoshop. So it doesn’t need to be the best at what it does… it just needs to be good enough. EDT. That, and, probably more important: schools keep pushing the Adobe Creative Suite on their students.

I might add that if you’re looking purely for a sample editor, so no multitrack, on OS X, Twistedwave for me feels closest to the CoolEdit I grew up on. Audacity’s is probably the first one to try because FLOSS. I struggle with its UI at times—although maybe they’ve implemented scroll to zoom since I last tried it. And I don’t like how everything’s conceptualised as a ‘project’ that needs to be exported, even when working on a single file. I just want to open a file, modify and save it. Gimp made a similar mistake at some point…

Theoretically, the way to go about it would be to save several generated static HTML pages from your blog and work backwards from there, adding the necessary Wordpress PHP. Granted it would be intense work, but then you would no longer have the impending cancellation of your theme hanging over your head.

So your Wordpress host doesn’t allow custom themes? Because theoretically, you should be able to make a ‘modern’ theme that creates the same HTML + CSS as your beloved vintage theme.

I sympathise with wanting to keep the presentation. It was made in and for this context. It’s like reading an old magazine, you get so many extra clues about the context from the design. If a magazine does a redesign, it only affects the issues going forward. In my ideal world, blog redesigns work the same way.

I’ve done my share of maintaining and archiving older websites, where I tried to keep the design in place while updating the underlying infrastructure (or converting it to static HTML). The one thing I would sometimes change is to ‘zoom in’, multiplying all pixels in the CSS by a small amount, because the web moved to larger text sizes and screens, so older websites tend to look tiny.

Have been reading Hacker News for many years, and feel like this kind of headline is quite common from the HN/SV bubble. Paul Graham writes like this too. It’s the language of a software tutorial for novices, applied to life. It’s this shift that makes it feel so pretentious! As a reader it’s fine to accept being a novice reading expert advice, when the subject is a computer program. When the subject is life choices, a writer would normally adopt a more humble tone, since most readers would need to be convinced that someone had all that more expertise than themselves. At the same time, I find it slightly endearing in its naivety, because these subjects being too complicated to capture in simple rules doesn’t stop the authors from trying.

This info is not entirely correct: they cite ‘the bulletin’, which links to sources that say Brussels airlines is planning to make 3000 unnecessary flights, as part of 18.000 flights planned by their mother company Lufthansa. Lufthansa published this news themselves, I presume they also hope the rules get changed. Not that one should have sympathy for the airline, but it’s good to keep the facts straight. And note that in this case, pressure on the EU officials could still help prevent (at least a part of) these flights.

This info is not entirely correct: the sources they cite (in French and Dutch) say Brussels airlines is planning to make 3000 unnecessary flights. The mother company Lufthansa published this news themselves, I presume they also hope the rules get changed. Not that one should have sympathy for the airline, but it’s good to keep the facts straight.

That’s a great question. From what this article describes, the movement to reclaim space for pedestrians and cyclists started within civil society, not with city planners. Of course at the time there were still people hesitant about these changes, but there was a momentum.

> In the 1960s, Dutch cities were increasingly in thrall to motorists, with the car seen as the transport of the future. It took the intolerable toll of child traffic deaths – and fierce activism – to turn Amsterdam into the cycling nirvana of today

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

> The digital touch screen ones won because they are so much easier to clean. A current model induction stove is a completely flat sheet of glass.

For sure it’s easier to clean, but on the ones I’ve used I find the “buttons” very fidgety because of this flat design. I’d sacrifice some ease in cleaning for the tactile feedback of mechanical buttons or ideally a (stepped) dial.

If you’re a native speaker I imagine that’s true, but if you learned the language later in live it remains a pain. I feel comfortable discussing love, art and politics in French but I still dread writing down a phone number!

I would think so too. The advantage is that since it’s part of daily life, you create this baseline of exercise that is always there, also when you lack motivation or time to do other sports.

“That’s all you need to know” is not the best way to put it… “It’s one of the best hacks out there” would be better. It’s kind of “take the stairs instead of the elevator” on steroids… you’re modifying something you have to do anyway, creating a new habit that will work in your favour… and in this case it also has environmental benefits and is likely cheaper then other forms of transport. But like any hack, there are scenarios where it won’t work, that’s clear.