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Long ago I made the decision to live in a smaller house close to work. My company's office is 15 minutes by bike from my house. Riding through the cool air every morning was a great start to my day. The office is perched above a canal. As I worked, I'd watch the boats go by and the bascule bridge go up and down. It was a great life.

Now I'm working in windowless cinderblock closet in my basement. I live near family and friends so just uprooting to a mini-mansion in the country isn't really a workable option. Companies clearly valued nice offices as a quality of life benefit to their employees, but now providing that nice office experience is squarely on my shoulders.

If my partner and I are going to be working remotely for the long term we'll probably need to move to a bigger house that can give us both better work spaces, which will probably cost $200K-$300K more than our current home. $250K financed at 3% interest over 30 years is $1200/mo plus things like heat, maintenance, furnishings, etc.

I don't expect my company to pony up a $15K/year remote work stipend, but also I see this a WFH future as a net downgrade from my old way of life.

I believe it was Thomas J Flip, in 1911.

Leatherman multitools are named after the inventor, Timothy S. Leatherman.

I was just talking to a friend about how 1 part water plus 1 part ethanol becomes 1.92 parts solution.

This raised a question for me that I have yet to research/answer. Maybe one of you knows... if the above solution is 50% ABV, what happens if I add one more part alcohol to the solution? Is it now 66.6% ABV? More? Less? How does ABV take into account the fact that this solution is packed together tighter than its constituent parts?

Make the officers buy it personally. Have cities pay officers 110% of the base rate, such that officers with clean records get a bonus based on it. Those whose rates go up will pay the difference or leave the force.

BTW, I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive into having cops not violate constitutional rights.

As a mid-career software engineer who would be interested in getting into the "geospatial industry",

A) What technologies should I learn to allow me to get my foot into the industry? I have historically focused on being a UX focused web engineer. I'm sure that experience could surely transfer, but am interested in learning the technologies and/or understanding that is more core to geospatial problems.

B) As someone who loves maps and imagery, but does not want to work for the military industrial complex, how do I avoid point #3. "In geo, you either die a hero or live long enough to make the majority of your revenue from defense and intelligence."

The traditional understanding of monopolies does not seem so useful in this case.

We live a world where there are two walled gardens that control everything you do. They are both lovely and nice, and you can choose which you pick, but in both, everything you do owned by the landlord. Even how we communicate is controlled, and talking to people in the other garden is degraded. (iMessage and FaceTime).

Even if both walled gardens have 50% marketshare, there is no monopoly, but is that really the world we want to live in? Taking your business to the other walled garden is not an incentive to either company to build shorter walls.

It seems we need to be talking about regulating vertical integration and walled gardens, not monopolies.

It's like having only two grocery stores in town, and your kitchen is only able to cook food from one or the other.

Once in India I took a taxi to the train station. I paid the driver and went inside to catch my train.

Ten minutes later while waiting in the station, the cab driver found me and made me replace a bill that he claimed I had given him that had a hole in it. He considered it worthless. Relatedly, it seems that stapling money is a pretty common way to organize bills there. I'm not sure how the two facts coincide.

I got a letter yesterday informing me I made an unemployment claim. Bummer.

It sounds like these companies have to account and compensate employees for the risk they're asking them to take.

Long term health impacts, the risk of infecting loved ones at home, the risks of incurring thousands of dollars of uncovered hospital bills... all of these risks have real costs and I think it's fair to compensate employees who are willing take them in service of their corporations.

Given there is a question in the Amateur Extra exam question pool about how VECs can properly conduct a remote exam, I'm surprised this isn't more widespread.

Is there any ethical and easy way to keep cats out of my yard?

I live in an suburban single family neighborhood where the houses are close together. (5000sq lots) There are 3 or 4 different solitary cats I see slinking through my yard from time to time. They all seem like outdoor house cats as opposed to feral cats.

I try to hiss at them and scare them off but they come back. Is there a method that will encourage them to avoid my yard?

Historically professors have tenure (admittedly less so now, I believe), so how they score on evaluations has no real bearing on them keeping their jobs.

I had a professor who was a terrible lecturer, and he knew his student evaluations were terrible every time. As he handed out the evaluations he would tell us that he did not read them, and did not care what we wrote.

I graduated twenty years ago, but just checked the department's website. He's still employed!

When I bought Sonos speakers for much of my house in 2012-2014 it was selling itself as an alternative to hifi equipment that lasts decades. In retrospect my expectation that Sonos would be longer lived than that was short sighted, I should have known better.

This is planned obsolescence at its finest and I guess I won’t be buying Sonos/other smart speakers again.

There’s no reason to replace perfectly good speakers every 5-10 years because the microcontroller inside isn’t profitable enough to continue to support. Good sounding/looking powered speakers with a small compartment inside for a modular brain would be a pretty good trade off, basically like driving the same TV panel with a different set top box every few years.

An internet connection isn’t required for the Nest thermostat to operate the furnace either.

I can appreciate not wanting to allow Google the opportunity to brick your thermostat (and hence your furnance) through some kind of software issue but if you’re willing to extend that faith to their smoke detectors, why not your furnace?

Is there a way to make DDG Lite chrome's default search engine?

Chrome seems to let me create non-default search engines, set the full DDG as the default, but not set lite as the default.

They are the operator and majority shareholder, and have agreed to purchase the rest of the shares from Comcast by 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-hul....

Disney also operates Hulu.

Major League Soccer is going through this problem now. They prohibit political displays in stadium but are now in the business of deciding whether signs that say things like "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" or "end gun violence" are political or not, and all of the worms that come out of that can.

https://deadspin.com/by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...

Say a company sells 10% of itself to an investor for $10M, with a 2x preference.

If the company sells for $100M, the investor gets $20M off the top. My question: Does the investor still own 10% of the shares, and will they recoup $8M of the remaining $80M?

Is their $10M investment now worth $20M or $28M?

It used to be that the "profit" from advertisement paid for journalists to write stories that would get you to look at them.

Now the profit from ads largely goes to engineers to build products for the web, (and shareholders of tech companies).

Both journalism and web stuff provide public good, but we need to figure out how to replace the revenue that financed journalism. The public was getting it for "free" before, and when it moved online we continued to want to get it for free, but the advertising model did not survive the transition.

While Seattle still has a ton of work to do, is much more progressive on these issues than they Bay Area, and it’s getting better, not worse.

See also: Burke Gilman Missing Link, an extension to fill a 1.4 mile gap in Seattle's most popular bike trail, halted very much the same way by a concrete company who has used environmental laws to argue that its business would be impacted because its drivers can't be trusted to drive trucks near people biking.

City governments are run by the people who show up. Start showing up, and you can change your city too.

He flew too close to the valuation sun.

Having a first child can be an incredibly stressful and confusing time. I think the best preparation is to have a solid support network ready to support you and your family while you adjust to your new life.

In my city, there is a nonprofit that connects groups of parents of newborns together so they can process the crazy stuff that's happening in their lives. I would heartily recommend finding this kind of support to any new parent. https://www.peps.org/

Hi Matthias!

Big fan of your videos. I hope your tendinitis improves and you can make it back into the shop soon to make more power tools out of old furniture other people have thrown out.

Cheers!

I was Flash developer from 2006-2010. Flash used ActionScript which is/was based on the ECMAScript standard.

Since then, I develop primarily in Javascript, based on the ECMAScript standard.

Looking back, I don't even think anyone could find the seam in my career.

It's still available.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch?option.watc...