InefficientRed

Dirtbagging doesn't necessarily entail living outside. Could bum a room for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbag_climbing for context.

To clarify: I tend to think of living out of a 40L pack as a dirtbag thing rather than a nomad thing... most of the nomads I know just use hard shell luggage, including me when I hotel hop (I've had nice expensive backpacks destroyed by bag handlers, so hard rollers are better). OP mentions that thy don't have to check their 40L bag; I've always ended up with mine checked but I guess splitting the load into a second personal item could make that less likely.

There exist non-dudes, and getting caught without a tampon/pad is a thing that can happen for any number of reasons.

A hand wash with unlimited water will probably get the job done, but unlimited water is often a luxury.

IDK about nomading, but when dirtbagging you have an excess of time. If the sun is down then your day is done. In the winter especially, having chores to do is welcome reprieve from the cold and boredom. And bathrooms or laundromats are so awesome. Warm and dry and bright.

My first impression is that this is a LOT of clothes and the electric stuff is a bit weird.

A few differences between dirtbag and nomad (the latter AFAICT is mostly hotel/airbnb hopping?):

First, you think a lot about food and water. Especially water, and especially sans car. It's VERY heavy and very necessary.

Second, my emergency pack is almost completely different. No vitamin shoppe merch. An ACE bandage, 8 aspirin per day from civ, 1 dose of imodium per day from civ, gauze, anti-bacterial cream, tape, suture kit, and one dose of a more powerful pain killer for serious emergencies if you can get it. No rapid tests (travel usually required a PCR anyways), but a couple KN95s. Cash in both USD (clean, unfolded, new bills) and the local currency. Maps.

Third, weight really matters.

Fourth, cleanliness really matters. You're essentially homeless. Diners and cafes kick out homeless people if you try to stay 9-5. In addition to organizing my life around being clean, I also had a whole separate emergency "Not A Dirtbag For A Day" kit.

I guess the other big difference is that all of my day-to-day stuff fit in roughly 15L so that I could carry 5L water and my gear could consume the other 20L.

This is an issue where I could imagine something actually getting done in US politics. Dems would have a hard time opposing a worker's rights issue and Republicans would have a hard time opposing a bill framed as anti-cancel culture. Assuaging people's fear of losing their livelihoods over politics wouldn't solve all our problems, but would probably help lower the temps just a bit.

But a very important difference from the co.'s perspective is that discriminating against non-soccer-players isn't illegal...

Churches and charities can get involved in politics, including ballot issues and legislation. They just can't get involved in campaigns for specific candidates. In practice, the IRS is terrified of touching religious orgs so "anything goes" as long as the church isn't a straight up criminal enterprise.

IMO the actually important thing about churches is that they don't have to file a Form 990. I don't actually have much of an issue with churches getting involved in politics -- it happens on both sides and frankly the idea of religion being divorced from politics is a fairy tale anyways -- but I do wish every church had to file a Form 990 so the public (and congregants!) can see how this tax-free money is spent.

There is a logic: elected officials want to be seen as supporting new business growth but of course can't literally invest taxpayer money in seed rounds. It's not reasonable or sane, of course, but that's why it happens...

Anyways, I think that sort of thing is mostly in the past by now? I don't see it happening much around here anymore. Perhaps there's a new grift.

1. You have a conversation and politely ask as a neighbor. Maybe mention it a couple times to make sure the point gets across.

2. If that doesn't work, you research the regulation and have a second conversation explaining the issue in legal terms instead of neighborly terms.

3. If that doesn't work, you have a conversation and leave a note explaining that you don't want to cause trouble but that you will report to the city.

4. If that doesn't work, you -- at last -- get the city involved.

Without regulation, step 3 has no teeth. And you only get to step 3 if steps 1-2 fail, so the premise here is that simply asking isn't going to help anyways.

Most legal disputes can be handled amicably without getting the state or courts involved when it's clear who is in the right. But the law has to exist first, or else the abusive/negligent party will just continue to ignore the situation.

Refuse externalities are a systemic issue for food trucks. They were the #1 reason for complaints about food trucks in my city. There are news articles about beach towns banning food trucks and an article about Portland considering a ban in certain areas because of trash issues. This case was egregious but the problem is not uncommon.

> The thing is, red tape shouldn’t be there to enforce compliance. He could have done that even if he’d paid the fees, which maybe he did?

He went on to dump in city trash cans (illegally), was fined, then arranged for a dumpster. He claims, and I believe this is true, that he didn't know either residential or city trash was off-limits. (I believe it is true because getting away with illegal dumping when done intentionally is super easy... you only get caught when you do it in broad daylight in front of a cop because you don't know it's not allowed.)

Given that issues with trash from food trucks are predictable and known, simply asking for proof that the food truck owner has access to a dumpster or other waste management option seems pretty reasonable. If the food truck owner has a proper waste management plan then describing it should take a few minutes max ("I am paying XYZ to use the dumpster located behind 123 Main St."). If they don't have a plan then this is a net positive for them because they'd almost certainly otherwise end up with either fines or a revoked license.

Even assuming a 1/200 success rate at reducing illegal dumping, requiring a waste management plan would cost 20 hours (amortized over hundreds of people) and save 40 hours (amortized over 1 person). The actual savings are probably much higher because 1/200 is unrealistically low -- I'm willing to bet most illegal dumping of food truck waste is not intentionally illegal.

Why is it incumbent on the rest of society to subsidize food truck owners at the tune of 2x time?

I am, however, surprised more companies don't have explicit HR conflict of interest clauses regarding religious entities. Not whole religions, but specific congregations/parishes/etc. Allowing these social networks as unchecked recruiting channels without some sort of control seems like asking for discrimination suits, even when the subject is a traditional religious organization rather than a cult.

I think about religion the same way I think about family. There's nothing wrong with referring your cousin or fellow congregant for a position, but a judicious company should probably flag the conflict of interest in the actual hiring process and perhaps also in management relationships. Otherwise you can end up with centers of influence in the company revolving around an external religious social network, which is a huge risk for the company.

(Alumni networks have the same issue in terms of institutional political dysfunction, but with the important difference that a company cannot be sued for preferring Stanford grads in promotions.)

If a picture of a rat could get a building condemned in all jurisdictions, NYC would be leveled by the end of the week ;-)

Well, no. After he stopped using our residential bins, he started dumping in city trash cans, was fined, and then ultimately paid for use of a dumpster.

> so adding that rule wouldn't have helped

He wasn't aware that either of his illegal dumping methods were illegal, and changed his behavior when he was informed (in the second case by a fine). So a form probably would have, in fact, prevented the situation from happening.

> and then everyone in Boston would have a 93rd step in the process.

I probably spent 40 hours on this issue. Much of that time highly unpleasant (cleaning out rodent traps, taking out cheap trash bags that would break and make a mess, spraying down gross trash bins and the back sidewalk, etc)

A one page online form that takes 5 minutes to fill out, for every food truck in the city, consumes perhaps 20 hours of time on the high end. So this one event I experienced already pays a net 20 hour profit to society.

I'm not the only one who has had issues with food truck trash disposal -- it's actually a fairly common issue for cities and one of the primary sources of complaints my city received about food trucks. A quick google search shows that other cities have similar issues and some even ban food trucks because of trash issues.

I'm sorry about your building code issues, that sounds very annoying and unfair, but only Ayn Rand could complain about filling out forms when a business is literally trashing someone's home ;-)

Renters are low class and have very little political power.

Fortunately for us, food truck operators in that city are also low class and also have very little political power.

Asserting our rights against a neighbor or landlord as renters was difficult. But asserting our rights as a residential citizen against a food truck operator was much easier (or, at least, the neighbor perceived that this would be the case and acquiesced).

I also find the educational requirements for hairdressing to be rather perplexing.

"Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously, and in any case our city was very landlord-friendly/human-hostile. In most cities waiting for the leas to be up and then moving out is always easier...

We resolved this by threatening the neighbor to go to the office that permitted his food truck.

If food truck regulations didn't exist, we would have been SOL until the lease was up.

> Or refuse to haul the trash entirely.

This was an impractical option.

On an 85 degree day, our apartment would stay below 75 (and below 70 until late afternoon close to the end of the workday) if we kept the large front windows open, the kitchen door open, and some well-placed fans. It would heat up to 85 very quickly if you closed off the airflow. Working in 85 degree heat is highly unpleasant.

To say nothing of the rats and fruit flies/ants, which were impossible to keep out of the apartment even when we kept the doors and windows closed.

1. Create a true one-stop shop for starting a business, with step-by-step guides and well-organized information that cover city and state requirements.

2. Simplify the process to obtain building permits by combining steps and paperwork, creating more guides for complying with agency rules, and lowering fees.

These seem like excellent recommendations.

I'm not so sure about the other recommendations:

> 3. Eliminate “clean hands” requirements to ensure those working to lift themselves out of poverty are not immediately disqualified.

Maybe. Not being able to start a business because of a few parking tickets on your personal vehicle is obviously harmful. But there's also potential for abuse. Some sort of dollar limit does seem reasonable.

> Remove unfair barriers that burden specific types of work, such as home-based businesses and food trucks, with unnecessary restrictions.

1. What barriers? "Must prove you have a refuse management plan" may sound like needless red tape, but see my top-level post.

2. home-based businesses sound like no big deal when you're on SFH >= half acre lots, but these rules exist in dense cities for a good reason. The type of business and type of residential dwelling are important considerations. Running a business out of a studio apartment using the hallway as a waiting room can be enormously disruptive to hundreds of people.

> Work with the state to eliminate state-level bar- riers to work, such as criminal history checks, that often target vulnerable residents.

Again, largely in favor but the details matter.

This obviously introduced many issues. The (~6 very large) bins were always full by 3 days after pickup and then overfilled all over the back of the complex for the rest of the week. Rodent and especially ant/fruit fly issues exploded. The smell was atrocious. The bins were directly behind our kitchen door, and we didn't have AC, so our kitchen door had to stay closed. The kitchen door was key to the airflow that would naturally cool the apartment, so the entire apartment was miserable.

Worst of all, the neighbor did not take any of the bins to the curb each week, was unresponsive, and our landlord was predictably unhelpful. For many weeks I patched the issue by hauling this guy's business trash to the curb every single morning (which is a lot more work, and much more unpleasant, than it perhaps sounds like).

Before that experience, I would probably see rules like "food trucks must file a form proving they have a legal place to dump their refuse" and consider it to be absurd red tape.

Just register a cheap domain name and point its DNS records at a free email provider (or setup an incoming mail server... outgoing with getting labeled spam is the hard part anyways)

The problem is that ArcGIS isn't just software; it's also data, data management/storage/interop, process automation, and so on.

There are other sources for the data, and a lot of the data is open, but the Python/R model doesn't translate directly because those sources have to be individually licensed and integrated. And once in a blue moon you'll need ArcGIS for the data anyways and now your whole FOSS investment is up in flames because you fork over the license to get the data anyways...

You can do a lot of what ArcGIS can do if you know the entire ecosystem and all the data sources and how to glue them all together. But that skillset approaches "Senior SWE", at which point the generic GIS major + an ArcGIS license is waaaaay cheaper.

In fact, ESRI could probably get away with drawing even more blood.

(don't get me wrong; I think OP is correct that esp gov't agencies should invest in FOSS solutions, and the amount of effort required for a full digital twin is definitely worth NOT doing on top of ESRI tech... but the value add of ArcGIS for most GIS applications is difficult to deny given the differential in labor costs you get by staying in the ESRI sandbox... there are literally hundreds of undergraduate degree programs that basically exist to churn out affordable ArcGIS techs... the same is not true for FOSS alternatives, where to get comparable expertise you literally need to hire something comparable to a Senior SWE; it's going to cost you waaay more than "fresh GIS major + $4K".)

https://twitter.com/LooksRare/status/1521564976112369664

etc. which point to these links (all 404):

https://docs.looksrare.org/about/hiring/frontend-engineer

https://docs.looksrare.org/about/hiring/backend-engineer

https://docs.looksrare.org/about/hiring/backend-engineer-ind...

https://docs.looksrare.org/about/hiring/ux-specialist

All of the LooksRare job postings 404.

The rest have application instructions which amount to "engage with our social media", which makes me wonder if the jobs ever existed or if it's exclusively a way to generate leads and the appearance of buy-in. The beauty of anon hiring is that we'll never know.

How is it even possible to employ someone in the US without knowing their legal identity?

That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things will just get worse.

> EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.

This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement benefits.

> My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.

The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge that you can buy a starter home is very different from $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human cost. See articles like this: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-when-g...

This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.

Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.