rm445

They're good pockets, aren't they? But the ones I've owned seem to be sized and proportioned for a stanley knife or similar, not a phone or wallet.

I think the author is onto something, though I'm still not convinced these pockets give a nice line with much in them, which people generally care about. Dickies-type trousers tend to have a looser fit than the pictured trousers. The article photos with a phone held partly in the pocket aren't definitive.

I'd like to describe, without advocating, an alternative model, not claiming it's better than the 'exec pay is at the market value' model but maybe worth thinking about. Even though it's clearly wrong in lots of ways, I think under the surface it drives a lot of people's thinking.

You might call-it a lottery-winner model. If you took the view that company executives are jumped-up middle managers who find themselves in a position to screw the shareholders and other employees and drive their compensation into the stratosphere, then a given exec is like a lottery-winner, and not necessarily possessing employable skills that translate on the open market. Their pay would be structured something like {10% more than the layer below them, for the added senior responsibility} + {enormous multiples more, because they're in a position to take it}.

Of course, skilled executives can and do find other similarly-well-paid positions. But this model works on the thinking of observers, and other people in the distressed organisation, in two ways. (1) Thinking of a company in distress as no longer being able to fund lottery-winners. (2) Thinking that such jobs could be filled on promoted-middle-manager sort of pay. As in, why wouldn't the financial controller take on the CFO role for a 10% or 20% (or 100%) pay rise? Why wouldn't an operations manager become CEO for 10% or 20% or 100% more?

My take on this is that (1) is false, executive compensation is a small part of company finances and would particularly be small beans compared to the impact of turning a distressed company around. And (2) is... somewhat based in truth? I do think that growth in executive pay is in some sense wrestling value away that belongs to the owners of the capital. But shareholders and boards of companies in distress will always be looking for a miracle, it's a lousy time to be seen as settling for second-best or dealing with people at the top jumping ship.

Complete tangent to your interesting post, but in companies that build a good safety culture, fire safety is within everyone's purview and something anyone can ask about. In the organisation I work at, the marketing manager could totally raise safety issues.

It's surprising until you start to think about it, at a certain size, many companies are very much at existential risk from a building fire.

Interesting read but I think this 'Quote Investigator' went off at a tangent with "pour encourager les autres" (a famous quote in its own right, but not quite the same sentiment). It seems more like the 1961 navy cartoonist who coined "all liberty is canceled until morale improves" deserves credit for the creative act, unless some earlier source is found.

What you're saying makes some sense - a television broadcast, say, requires effort from a lot of people to produce - and, previously, expensive special equipment to broadcast, though now TV content is often streamed over the web - so it has a level of credibility, the TV news at least can't be spoofed by one person in their bedroom on the other side of the world. (Note that deepfakes may be changing this).

But the world we live in is full of "web services that let people post whatever they want at any time". News from Twitter may be weird but many people want to get their news from the BBC website, or the New York Times, or Reuters or whatever. Or their own government's websites. Just web services that people post from - presumably with levels of editing and checking but all presumably with security flaws that could bypass them.

It's not clear exactly what you're asking for. A technological solution involving careful checking of cryptographic signatures? Or some sort of super-expensive-to-spoof source of all important news?

A question on a related topic, then: given that hats are dead, how can a person appear reasonably good if they want to wear a hat for comfort/practical reasons?

Clearly one of the big no-nos is mixing formal and casual. Fedora wearers without a suit, also the weird college-student fad of wearing a waistcoat ("vest") with casual clothing, much ridiculed. But on the other hand, wooly hats and baseball caps are more casual than a lot of general leisure and business clothing. We have the flat cap, but here in England that seems like an affectation unless you're from particular places where it's traditional. What alternatives are there?

There are difficulties in overcoming users' expectations and actually monetising, but it shouldn't be ruled out completely. Once people are using something as a major source of entertainment, some proportion of them are usually willing to pay for even mild improvements. An analogy might be free radio broadcasts (and web radio, and piracy) versus modern music streaming services.

Make no mistake, short-form content can be a major entertainment source. Personally, I recently deleted Tiktok from my phone, more because of its power to eat up time when I ought to be sleeping than because of the recent privacy furore.

Reddit is too nebulous to get very mad about. You can leave a subreddit you're sick of. Trash your account if you're worried your comments risk doxing yourself. Start afresh, it's easy. Everyone is pseudonymous and reputations seem to matter far less than places like Hacker News.

I've been using Reddit - reading a lot, commenting quite a bit, posting a little - since I read about it in the Joel on Software blog in 2006. It has been fascinating and fun but I've made no lasting friendships or connections. I'd move to something better with no regrets, but the site owners are probably never going to annoy me enough to move to something worse out of principle.

Yeah, that's why the churn of food-delivery companies isn't going to end unless external factors cut off the flow of investment. It's conceivable that one winner could be massively profitable, at enormous scale, with all the efficiencies of a significant proportion of the population being bought-in and everything from schedules to menus to delivery vehicles optimised to make the service effective. (Here is your daily PrimeMeal, valued PrimeCitizen). Until then everyone is making huge losses with ad-hoc restaurant collection.

Probably spend differently. Because both of your points are kind of true: the future is online, but money spent up to now hasn't necessarily got results. Pure wild speculation, but I suspect that some of the metrics that drove advertising AND content onto the big beasts of the current Internet were gamed or fraudulent - it will be interesting to see if any big scandals happen.

If you were a TV fan, watching workday evenings, then indulging more at the weekends could carry you up to that the average.

People watch a lot of TV, it's the default entertainment. I recently (before lockdown) casually asked a colleague, someone I like and admire in their professional life, "Hey, what do you like to do when you're not at work?" After looking mildly anguished for a few moments, he eventually allowed that he enjoys watching the Formula 1 races. (i.e. a few hours at weekends, not every weekend) He was noticeably cool with me since - I'm worried the question, or rather the realisation that he couldn't answer it, offended him. I can't prove my colleague has the TV on for hours a day, but I'm pretty certain he does. If he was reading novels or doing crosswords or walking the dog, it would be a hobby. Putting the TV on until you're sleepy isn't.

What on earth happened to Skype? Over a decade of head start, why wasn't it completely untouchable when COVID-19 came along?

Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.

The bridge across the river Wear right next to Dunelm house is an example of building with concrete done right. Use the properties of the material to make a structure that is light and airy, pleasing yet practical.

The soviet bunker that is Dunelm House itself though. Bring on the day of its demolition. Please let me push the plunger and set off the explosives.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The filter thing seems obviously true, but it doesn't rule out whole styles being better than others, even if the mediocre and pedestrian efforts from those styles were eventually winnowed out. Besides, each day people, somewhere, are making decisions about the next awful building. It doesn't seem enough to loftily let our descendents decide whether to pull down a building after we're all dead, before a single stone has been laid.

Consider this view as a thought experiment: say every Norman cathedral was beautiful. Maybe some were inspired and some were pedestrian, some were less beautiful because of the locally-available stone, some had long delays in construction and ended up with a mishmash of styles. Or whatever. You could filter them by appeal, or randomly, or any other method, and still end up with a bunch of beautiful buildings. Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. GIGO.

I have a heuristic. A 'code smell' for social science articles, which is something like, is all of Western society explained by happenings in the USA?

Caveats: there's nothing wrong with writing an American article about America. And it's not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The 'smell' occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon.

This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate in all kinds of places - it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys.

How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway? The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to the author's ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it's not a perfect correlation.

Building stuff is straightforward where there's not much stuff already - because it's wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it's something new like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there's hardly any government, and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.

If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive authority. But there's no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.

It's the paradox of the firm. Centralised authority seems to be effective for small and local efforts, while not being how you'd want the whole society to be run.

Yes, the Italians-speak-loud-and-close theory is both plausible and bleakly funny. It works for New Yorkers as well.

Also Japan at all of 900 deaths despite an early start. Articles have been written about government responses and cultural behaviours, but it feels like there's something with a stronger effect out there waiting to be discovered.

A genetic quirk, perhaps? Or maybe a strain of another coronavirus (a kind that gives 'common cold' type symptoms) that has already swept the region and confers some immunity? Presumably people with the right expertise are looking into this sort of question already, but it seems like a lot of media reports are going off half-cocked. I'm not trying to apologise for European or US governments' handling of the crisis, but countries have all reacted differently and it doesn't look like that strong a correlation between their responses and the outcomes.

The US seems to have a fairly adversarial, legislative rules-based relationship between policing and people's rights to justice, if that makes any sense. This is just speaking as a layman observing from outside. (Contrast with other countries. There are many places which achieve even less control of their police, or the police serve corrupt interests, but there are also countries which seem to have more public consent and less excessive force).

So, the USA - the bill of rights, search warrants, Miranda rights. It's not exactly policing by consent, it's more like an understanding that the police will go to any lengths they feel necessary, so there need to be hard rules that completely invalidate the case against someone if breached.

I guess the same model can continue to be refined through the democratic process. Technology can play a part. One can imagine future laws that impose strict rules about body cams (e.g. that absence of a recording implies innocence, or that 'lost' footage carries a presumption of guilt in police brutality allegations). Ubiquitous surveillance, not to say it's a good thing, but if it's happening anyway, it should be useful in preventing excessive force by police too. Laws could be passed specifically enabling (and preventing treatment as a crime) various technological forms of monitoring of law enforcement by the public.

> What do you smart (non-cynical) internet people think?

I don't know how one would start to rip up American policing and produce a kindly institution that was accepted universally by the community. No-one can be that non-cynical. But I guess I'm non-cynical in thinking that there's still some mileage in democracy and the rule of law, and progress might still be made via the normal channels. Of which, by the way, protesting is a part.

I stopped using Mac Mail quite recently, because of a bug that meant not all my IMAP folders were displayed.

Remember Mozilla Thunderbird? It's great. Also has an RSS reader built in.

All these speech assistants are almost stateless, aren't they? I mean, they can ask you questions and go into a listen-for-an-answer state, but, at least last time I tried, you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on.

It's quite interesting to hear very small children talk to voice assistants. Probably not surprising, but it seems like in normally-learnt human communication you expect your conversational partner to remember the context of what you were saying, and carefully forming canned commands is a separate learned skill. It suggests these voice assistants have still got a way to go, and it seems more like a paradigm change, a big leap, than just incremental improvements.

That's bad and wrong, you should think past your familiarity for a minute and logically not do it.

This shouldn't be mixed up with the other common case which is often discussed, 'American' as the demonym for people and things from the USA. That isn't quite as bad (though it still annoys other people from elsewhere in the Americas) because it's using the name of the superset - Americans, from the USA, are also Americans, from the continent. Whereas, when "America" (the USA) does something, it doesn't necessarily mean all of America does it. The USA is a subset of America, not a superset or the only entry.

Language isn't always logical, but if you won't draw the line at something so clearly backwards as using the whole continent's name for the actions of one country, you can only expect it will start an argument every time.

The obvious one is bringing costs down by automating labour, with self-driving cars etc.

There also may be a 'change the world' sort of outcome, where consumers en masse like the product so much that they change their behaviour and lifestyles, even if it eventually turns out that they spend more overall than they might have before - if people stop owning cars, cease cooking at home, taking away revenue from supermarkets and auto manufacturers. Although this doesn't appear to hold up in the first analysis, second-order effects might start to appear - e.g. if consumers change their lifestyles, can you capture the value that they would have invested in owning a kitchen, or a garage and driveway?

This is all very speculative, I'm not claiming Uber etc can achieve this, just that different equilibria are possible - for instance, I gather that in some Chinese cities street food is incredibly good and cheap while density is high enough to make owning good cooking facilities a real pain.

Poka-yoke is a massively useful concept in the design of physical objects, and it should apply to design of software interfaces as well.

A key principle is making different things look different. In a mechanical assembly, often you see very different pins and fasteners doing similar jobs - but what may seem an oddity on the part of the designer is a godsend when assembling. I'm sure we've all puzzled over putting together household objects where you have several slightly-different lengths of the same screw. In software, consistency is incredibly important, so that users can expect behaviours and discover features, but there's still a case for making different things visibly different.

3 astronauts in a fire and another in a training jet crash?

I guess there were probably other, non-astronaut deaths in the Apollo program, workers getting electrocuted or falling from gantries at contractors' manufacturing plants, but even if so, it's not renowned as an example of unsafe work conditions.

Not helpful to you except as an existence proof, but you can install Retropie on a Raspberry Pi and it will play SNES ROMs fine. I believe the emulator is a variant of SNES9x.

The name alone will bring out a bunch of flamers, but Stephen Wolfram wrote an enormous tome on cellular automata. I haven't read it all, and an index search shows it has nothing about the universal constructor specifically, but it should be a substantial introduction. It's available free at:

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/

Are you mixing up Plan9 with some legendary vapourware OS, MULTICS or something? Maybe the HURD? (NB: not entirely vapourware, but less finished than Plan9). Because Plan9 was (and is) a real system that you could (and can) run.

People love Slack because IRC is loveable. People use Slack because its advantages over IRC are in areas that favour it being installed in corporate environments, while benefits of IRC (such as being free and open, simple and extensible, running in a shell) are neutral or even negatives for that environment.