wespad

In San Diego, we have a discount store called GTM that buys Costco closeouts and scratch-and-dent items and resells them for less. It has a loyal base of bargain shoppers, and it feels a bit like a treasure hunt.

You can buy normal or even individual quantities, like a single roll of paper towels, with no membership required. I imagine other big cities have similar stores, probably in lower-income areas, that fill a similar role.

I agree with you on hip-hop. It's very important to me. And it's great that it's become so ubiquitous. But it wasn't always like that. Early hip-hop was just music created extemporaneously at a party or a park jam. It wasn't even recorded. It didn't fit the format of "about 4 minutes and some seconds." And the whole mixtape era was music of the moment, not even an official release, mostly a promotional product.

These forms of media were work-for-hire projects owned by the publisher, paid at a rate per word or page. Assignment turned in and paid for (or not) and on to the next assignment. A volume game.

Comic books, original paperback books (crime/detective stories, westerns, science fiction, etc.), hip-hop,... all intended as disposable entertainment—the commodified, created content of its day.

This was my first computer. I got it for Christmas when I was 9 or 10. Can't remember if it was 1983 or 1984. Mostly used it, and its particular flavor of BASIC, to create graphic images, pixel by pixel. I remember making a fantasy sword picture. What a memory!

Standard Ebooks is my go-to for beautiful, well-formatted Public Domain books. The 2025 page is a wonderful gift to start the year. I'm off to read Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Happy New Year!!!

> The news isn't going to mow my yard, politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work.

Ain't that the truth.

Indeed they do. At least the Debian-based distros, like Ubuntu and Mint.

Every general purpose Linux desktop I setup gets Simon Tatham's puzzles and all of Kenta Cho's and Jason Rohrer's games.

https://www.freetaxusa.com/ and their parent company https://www.taxhawk.com/

They charge $14.99 for the state filing. Usually a coupon code available. Or go to the state's website (CA at least), and file that for free, too. But for the convenience of not having to input my info again, I'll pay their fee.

This is up there with one of my favorites from Hacker News: The Microhydro Plant

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895582

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075110

https://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/turbine.html

https://outline.com/6yf9UP https://archive.vn/YylTa

Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of interpretation.

My favorite Hacker News story of all time, about a guy who builds a small, water turbine power plant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895582

https://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/turbine.html

Previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13366216

This reminds me of a story I read about 10 years ago of a Japanese manufacturer of a very specific type and format of scientific lab notebook that ended production. I think about the story every now and then and go on a deep dive, but can never find it. Buried in the web.

My daughter (13) is a juggler. I am not. I'll just leave this here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_notation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap

Buy on the rumor, sell on the news.

There's a great documentary about Frank Frazetta called Painting with Fire. Later in life he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right hand. He taught himself to paint and draw again with his left.

When ever I want to learn something on my own, especially a comparative study, I include the search terms "syllabus' and 'reading list'. I figure there must be a class somewhere that has already covered this ground.

That's funny. I also use NoScript, just to be extra cautious, and when I go to Brave.com, I don't see ANYTHING. I would hope that somebody claiming to want to fix the web would be able to serve up a page that doesn't need permission to execute a script.

I work a cubicle job in the financial services industry, a large back-office for one of the largest independent broker/dealer networks in the country. Attending to email is essentially the crux of my job. The entire corporation is held together by email. My eye is constantly on not just my personal inbox, but several shared inboxes. A certain type of email hits a certain inbox and the clock starts ticking, I have a specific time frame in which to process a series of actions. I am just one cog. Once I'm done with my part, I fire off an email that hits a number of other shared inboxes and people in other departments pick up the baton and do their processes. If I fall out of my prescribed time frame, I become a bottleneck, the issue gets escalated to higher-ups and it can impact my performance review. If I get too many at once, I'm S-O-L. And, oh yeah, there are also faxes.

No mention of Hip-Hop?

It's the same with eyewear. Check out the 60 Minutes story on Luxottica:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM

They control over 80% of the global market, from manufacturing, to opticians, retail stores, and brands, including the second largest vision benefits company in the US.

Source, Lessons from a Successful Counterinsurgency: The Philippines, 1899-1902, by Timothy K. Deady

http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Ar...

The article cites an academic book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, (https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780299234133) by professor Alfred W. McCoy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_W._McCoy)

Taft was governor of the Philippines, and later Secretary of War, during the Philippine-American War.

According to Alfred McCoy (http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175724/):

"Starting in 1901, the first U.S. governor-general (and future president) William Howard Taft drafted draconian sedition legislation for the islands and established a 5,000-man strong Philippines Constabulary. In the process, he created a colonial surveillance state that ruled, in part, thanks to the agile control of information, releasing damning data about enemies while suppressing scandals about allies.

When the Associated Press’s Manila bureau chief reported critically on these policies, Taft’s allies dug up dirt on this would-be critic and dished it out to the New York press. On the other hand, the Division of Military Information compiled a scandalous report about the rising Filipino politician Manuel Quezon, alleging a premarital abortion by his future first lady. Quezon, however, served the Constabulary as a spy, so this document remained buried in U.S. files, assuring his unchecked ascent to become the first president of the Philippines in 1935."

Georges Lemaître: Priest & Scientist; Father of the Big Bang Theory; He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre

You mean, like this? http://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/turbine.html