c5karl

It's not a good idea to call 911 with non-emergencies.

But until a few decades ago, the primary way most of us to set our clocks was to call a number the phone company provided, which in our case was TI4-1212. "At the tone, the time will be ..."

A lot of consumer products ship with half-baked software and/or firmware. I wish Polk would fix the bug(s) that cause my soundbar to freeze and need a reboot several times per week. But it's an old product that's not longer sold, so I'm probably SOL.

Not just in cities. In the U.S. at least, a lot of people live in suburban townhouse complexes that have shared parking lots. It's going to take a lot of investment to make charging easy for everyone.

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3WU1izg

The genesis of the Post's gigantic comics section (three full pages on weekdays, if I remember correctly) was that they picked up all of the comics that had been run by the Washington Star when the Star (along with all the other evening papers) finally ran out of steam and closed up shop.

Anything is possible if you have a Standard Oil fortune and your collecting obsession starts early in life.

A lot of smaller cities (including the one I live in) are addressing this by designating "activity centers" where new, denser housing is incentivized and sought to be concentrated. Zoning is changed so that, as things like aging strip malls are replaced, a new street grid is laid down over old superblocks.

There's only so much that planning and zoning can do (developers will only build and lenders will only lend for what's deemed profitable), and fully building out these neighborhoods will take decades. But lots of people are thinking about this and seeking ways to make it work. Municipalities have an incentive to get it right. Maintaining the tax base relies on attracting new residents, many of whom are seeking walkable urban(ish) neighborhoods.

Fire safety, not the strength of wood framing, is what blocked this type of construction before. Effective sprinkler systems are what addressed that concern.

There remains a concern about fire safety during construction, before the sprinklers are activated. There have been serious fires and deaths of construction workers while these buildings were going up.

None of the flaws you cite is attributable to the stick-built construction. Dishonest and/or incompetent contractors can screw up a building made of any materials.

I'll respond to your anecdote with an anecdote of my own. I've been in a wood-framed apartment building for two years, and I never hear my neighbors. There are many ways to incorporate sound insulation in construction, and masonry isn't the only way to achieve it.

I would think that any turntable that allows for adjustment of the speed of the motor would have this already (based on my limited experience with turntables from decades ago). So, nice little app, but if it shows you the error of a non-adjustable turntable, it won't have a lot of practical applications.

You'll need to excuse the Washington Post Style section, which exists to explain the outside world to sheltered Boomers, even if it means vomiting up 2,000 words about an anecdote to make it look like a trend.

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3w3RrgT

The Patapsco is much wider here than at the locations of the two tunnels. It would have been a much bigger and more expensive project to build a tunnel that long.

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3RyScpS

The Union had a much larger population, far more resources, and almost all of the divided nation's industrial production capacity. In most cases, it's factors like those that determine the eventual victor in a war (see WWI and WWII for good examples of this).

But the weaker party doesn't need to defeat the stronger one. They just need to make the cost of the war greater than the price the stronger side is willing to pay. That's how the USA won its independence from Britain, after all. Part of what made the price too high in that case was assistance from the French (it was the French navy, not Washington's army, that sealed the victory in Yorktown, for example).

The leadership of the Confederacy was well aware of this and had diplomats all across Europe seeking help for their cause. If they had succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn.

A good book about Union efforts to keep Britain and other European powers out of the war: Our Man in Charleston, by Christopher Dickey.

Here's a "gift" link: https://wapo.st/3Nb5tm8

https://archive.is/jHeVJ

Brutalist does not have to be ugly. The Washington, D.C., subway system is brutalist, but Harry Weese's design for the system is beloved by locals and visitors alike.

There are ugly buildings of every architectural style.

In Washington, D.C., every May we get Police Week. Which is to say our drunk tourists have badges and guns and short fuses.

No one in Washington loves this "boon" to our local economy.

Oh, and ask people who own houses in Tampa's Hyde Park neighborhood what they think of Gasparilla.

Maybe not anymore. The building is being demolished. https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/last-remnants-hotel-pennsy...

https://archive.is/2023.08.08-012347/https://www.tampabay.co...

Those keyboard shortcuts (the ones that begin with a slash, at least) date back to Lotus 123.

Credit unions are not-for-profit companies that operate like a co-op or a mutual insurance company. The depositors are the owners. S&Ls were for-profit businesses.

Circuit City stores, back when they had entire walls of VCRs and tape decks and receivers, all of which were "on sale" (ahem), instructed their salespeople to always give customers definitive advice in their price range. "Oh, this Sony is the absolute best tape deck." Once people had reassurance that they were making the right choice, even from a total stranger, they'd open their wallets. But not before.

Or a Chromebook. If you don't need rich client Windows software, a cheapie Chromebook will meet all your needs. It will be fast out of the box and will stay fast.

Test your skill: Try to keep Tom Bombadil from boring you to death.

For this reason my grandfather wouldn't pick the corn from his backyard garden until my grandmother had the water boiling.

Compact Disc audio is uncompressed.

and that was achieved through marketing

To elaborate: The "tradition" of diamond engagement rings only dates back to the 1930s, invented almost whole cloth by the DeBeers cartel to sell diamonds. For that reason, I think saying it's a "part of the culture" overstates things. This is not a long tradition that connects us to our ancestors.