michael1999

And public lighting. The lamplighters started just a few years after the move from the sea shore to the desert.

Just remembered another one -- fire rules.

To begin with, camp fires were a normal -- even essential -- part of BM. Walking around, the city was illuminated by the flickering glow of crackling fires and conversation. And many of the temporary structures would be disposed of by having a big bonfire, often burn-night, or Sunday after, as a part of exodus.

But this caused several problems that demanded solutions. Camp fires can kick off sparks, and sparks in a large dense tent city is bad juju. So they forbid open fires, and required contained burn barrels or stoves. Big fires built directly on the playa get hot enough to bake the clay and leave burn scars. This violated their permits from the BLM. So they required metal insulation below. After a few of revs in the rules, fire in camps became practically forbidden.

It was sad. Campfires were replaced by lighting, and sound systems. Small group bonfire rituals were forbidden. So the warm, inviting glow of a crackling campfire and the murmur of conversation were replaced by the repellent cold light of leds, and edm, like an empty club. Serendipity and connection suffered.

The internals of Barcelona super-blocks are mixed spaces, with cars expected to stay under 5km/h (i.e. ride the brakes and feather the clutch) at all times. Many old-city areas are primarily pedestrian with cars allowed as 2nd-class visitors. Agree that this is rare in the USA.

They really did recapitulate the foundations of civilization. As a speed-run.

I'd love to read a history of it, but it won't be me. I haven't been in years, and it has changed profoundly since my first visit in 2000.

I'm not sure where you draw the line, but when you have to visit the DMV for a vehicle permit, you are well past the line of government.

More like the Crypto bros have reinvented the financial _fraud_ system from first principles. Ponzis, control-fraud, pump-dump, etc.

Some of this is selection bias, but lots of this is active work by the organizers.

Burning Man has slowly re-created the regulatory state in response to the standard pressures of civilization. To their credit, this has often been in response to near-misses, but sometimes in response to fatalities. It started with sanitation (potties), and banning guns/explosives. You can have 100 people shooting guns at a party in the desert without sanitation and muddle through. At 10k, you are building a cholera-mad-max experiment. A car running over a sleeping person prompted a designated road network. And then they adopted zoning, with hush-ville and the large sound installation ends. All supported by the ranger team preventing injury every day. Civilization is work.

In the extreme, you can observe direct transmission.

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

This showed the same dynamics as most carbon-capture boondoggles. They can never work, and receive funding _because_ they distract from the core problems.

A watch face would be fun.

I don't see how that is relevant. I am not aware of any outsourced job where the American alternative would cost anything near the minimum wage. The overhead of outsourcing and supervision would dwarf the raw basic labour cost of the $7.25 federal minimum.

I don't dispute that it would be easy to raise the minimum wage high enough to destroy jobs. But I do dispute that the current minimum wage is "often" high enough to do that.

https://www.indeed.com/career/call-center-representative/sal...

Your "often" is not borne out by actual econometric studies. The actual rate of minimum wage that produces dead-weight loss is much higher than most minimum wages in the USA.

In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage regulation is a heavy-handed way to change that bargaining relationship.

Upthread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009120

ctrl-F "standards" - zero results.

The fine article was more about the effects of bad lighting, and the motivation to change. It does not discuss the engineering and insurance standards that generate the bad choices. Perhaps you misread my comment. As long as the standards are left as-is, street engineers are going to keep doing as they are.

We need much better engineering standards if we are going to fix night lighting. A simplistic lux-on-the-ground measure combined with cost minimization produces a few lights, with bare bulbs, up hight, with brutal intensity. These are all things that produce glare directly on the eyeball.

You need much less light on the ground if the eyeball itself has no direct line to the hottest part of the lights. Instead, the night-blindness caused by excessive bare lighting is "fixed" by adding more fill lights for the shadows caused by the first lights. Classic addictive behaviour.

What fraction of investors who chose Nasdaq100 over SPY wouldn't have also wanted SpaceX? The whole point is hot and tech-heavy speculation.

Fun! Thank you. I wonder if I can find Mac keycaps and swap those in software. Their Mac versions are all full-size.

I wish I could find a Model M Space Saver with modern OS keys. I love the springs.

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious.

> Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.

https://scentofdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-soul-dawn-he...

Are there countries where trade unions are still active in training? Most places I see they are entirely focused on wage bargaining, and are happy to gut training for the young if they can maintain the generous pensions of the old.

You do need to justify it. There is a great moral hazard prioritizing the driver's safety over pedestrians, since the driver is most in control of the danger. There is very little a pedestrian can do to protect themselves from a driver on their phone who mounts the sidewalk.

Hard to get a plate if there's no VIN.

Info-minimized oidc handshakes with certified identity providers could verify age-category of a user with no other information shared.

Consider "log in with apple" as it is today. Depending on what you share, a relying website might not even get your name or email.

Landmines are not illegal, except for signatories of the Ottawa Treaty.

Yeah. iPhone and iPad have gone backwards for my mother every year. Losing the home button was a disaster. Every edge swipe, or double-click is more trouble. The new stuff is great for me, but the original skeuomorphic designs were so much better for my mom.

They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.

You can't really hedge a true shortage. You'll get some money, but you can't pump money into a fuel tank.

Bummer. I loved the glass bottles in the penguin, but I got tired fighting the durability problems. I got as far as researching custom gaskets and shims, and gave up.

How's the durability of the Crystal? I had two of the original Penguin systems, and the seals broke down and the frame stretched. I'd prefer to go back to the glass bottles.

The sharp points by the track-pad are bad design. Ive made some terrible decisions when he wanted to show off.