Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41738564

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

It's the same principle as not requiring unpaid overtime to get ahead etc. The government sets a regulatory framework, and businesses have to compete within the rules.

Women are still paid less than men, and hold fewer positions of power in politics or business. They still far outnumber men as victims of sexual assault. They are still expected to carry the burden of unpaid domestic work and care.

If women as a whole are achieving more than men, despite the disadvantages they still suffer, then good on them. That funding should be going towards educating men so that women can walk down a street at night without a completely reasonable fear of violence.

The tone of the article comes off uncomfortably close to the whole incel thing.

It's not always as convenient in the moment, but I find it has a positive effect on my relationships and mental health, and it saves me a bunch of money. And I have actual free time to spend on doing stuff like learning to play the piano.

Once you train yourself to recognize it, it's really scary - so many things in our modern lives are explicit traps - for a few moments of convenience (always made very easy), you burden your future self with a non-negligible amount of future work and entrust private details of your life to companies with a poor track record of keeping that data safe. So many things take only a few clicks to sign up, then you have to spend possibly hours on the phone later trying to cancel an account.

* Fairly durable * A security violation requires physical access to the paper storage * Flexibility - you can take a pen and draw anywhere on paper - and it will make sense to other readers without having to write custom software * Flexibility 2 - you can organize bits of paper any way you like

Having had my identity compromised through third parties (Premera, Experian), the security aspects are particularly compelling.

It also feels like a lot of the business innovation credited to software could have been possible using paper systems, e.g. reading about the Toyota Production System, it seemed more about process innovation than anything to do with software.

I think there's interesting research and ideas to find in this area, that could lead to a productivity boost. One example idea (I'm sure there are better ones) would be allowing simultaneous use of multiple versions of a library. E.g. This dependency I'm consuming uses CommonLibrary-1.2, and this other dependency uses CommonLibrary-2.4, but they can both get along just fine without having to find some combination both dependencies can agree on.

I guess the customer support horror I went through when they canceled my phone number out of the blue in Google Fi is also factored into that decision (took two months to get my phone number back), but to be fair, that wasn't an issue with their hardware.

Once you get used to it, Smalltalk is really the most amazing development environment. It's hard to describe how it feels to work with live objects - it's an incredible speed boost, because instead of grepping logs or stepping through code, you just interact with the objects directly, you can examine the state of instance variables, add new methods, or change code while the code is running. The feedback loop is so short, you get amazing productivity.

There's a great video floating around somewhere of someone debugging an Asteroids game while the game is running.

From what I've read, the downside is that working on larger programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more communication to keep the code base consistent and structured.

The toilet paper is made from bamboo, and comes wrapped in paper in a cardboard box. They operate in USA, Australia, and the UK.

You might get some benefits from a suitable climate moving into a fertile area, but equally you could get disastrous impacts from a suitable climate moving away from a fertile area.

You can see the impact of increased intensity of weather events on food availability already, for example, the horseradish crop failure this year means Burger King is out of Zesty Onion Dip until spring: https://dailygreenworld.com/2019/11/22/earth-changes/climate...

My (limited) opinion, is that auto-centric opponents want dense, walkable, cyclable cities. That doesn't imply towering skyscrapers, six stories of apartments with mixed retail, office, and light industry are sufficient. That should provide enough density to make public transit a viable option, if road space is reclaimed from cars.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/16/urban-living-...

There was also the General Motors street car conspiracy[2], which saw car companies buy up privatized public transit only to run it into the ground.

The fight against this future being imposed is also fascinating reading, particularly the work of Jane Jacobs[3]. She correctly saw past the hyperbole to the unfortunate consequences, fought against the vision but lost.

The reason not much infrastructure is being built these days is simply that cities are running out of money and credit. Every road built comes with a price tag for building it, and an ongoing price tag for maintaining it. The building price was so often done on credit (bonds), but the maintenance price is usually not considered. Given that roads bring in basically zero income for a city, every road built comes with an obligation for the city but no way to pay for it. In the past credit was issued on the assumption that future growth would somehow provide some payback, but after 50 years cities have hit the growth limits and still not seen any payback. Strong Towns[4] is an excellent book on the subject.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [3] https://shelterforce.org/2016/05/10/jane-jacobs-defender-of-... [4] https://www.strongtowns.org/book

Even if there are other, larger, causes of death, that still doesn't make it irrational to want a city where one major cause of death for children has been eliminated. Especially when the cause of death in question is something as unnecessary as using a car to move around a city.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi... [2] https://www.nsc.org/driveithome