HN user
I like feeling every word as I read.
I know what you mean. I don't typically sub-vocalize, but when I run across a particularly beautiful bit of prose I slow down in order to hear it in my head. If I'm on my own I might read it aloud.
Absolutely. On the other hand, Russia's previous conquests / adventures (Chechnya; Georgia, 2008; Ukraine, 2014) were shrugged at by the west. It's wasn't insane to expect that taking over the rest of Ukraine, if quickly successful, would have been treated likewise. I'm cynical enough to think it probably would have been.
The "yes men" told Putin the military was able to do it. Probably they even thought it was, because everyone below them - right down to the individual soldiers selling off their fuel and ammunition - said everything was a-ok.
Even so, the initial invasion was a near-run thing.
Funnily enough, I am (was) an actor. Public speaking and telling stories are my jam. So... I do all that. I love making wacky analogies to help people understand complex systems.
Higher-level decision-making, I find, isn't so much like that. Sometimes it's just tradeoffs: "if the company's going this direction, then A is better; but if that, then B". But they haven't even recognized the this and the that - and don't want to think them through transparently - so I've got to choose the A or the B in the dark. Actually, it's worse than that, because some people have (by implication) already committed to the this, and others to the that, but neither side wants to talk about either, because that would create conflict. So, the best (job- / career-wise) choice for me is to predict which of A or B best satisfies whichever side will be most influential when the bill for A or B comes due. Either could be (technically speaking) correct, but the choice is never made on a technical basis.
Yes. Furthermore, when I write precisely - because it's an important subject (read: will cost the company money) where we must be on the same page - people's eyes glaze over, and they ask for a meeting or a phone call instead. So, we do that, and I answer all the questions, and then everyone goes away with a different idea about what we're talking about. The only person who doesn't do that is our controller, who'll tell me "I had to read this three times, but now I understand", and I love her for it. Sadly, she doesn't make decisions, just pays the bills.
I'm sure it's my fault, somehow - but I'm a damn good writer; I just don't know how to communicate with people who won't put forth the effort to engage with detail.
The latest advice is "put in through [LLM]". Which, yeah, takes out the details, and makes bullet points, but sometimes the details are the point... Right?
I have a friend whose dad finished his engineering career at SABRE (he retired some years before it shut down). According to him, the original concept wasn't far-fetched, but that they didn't crack some manufacturing / materials issues. He thought they should have continued to work on those, instead of redesigning to avoid them. He had retired by the time we spoke about it, and I don't know the particular model / design to which he was referring. If that's accurate, then possibly materials technology / manufacturing techniques have matured to the point that the "simpler" design he preferred could be feasible. That's all second-hand speculation, so take it with a dose of salt, but a short timeline might be reasonable.
Static (relatively, at least) battle lines? Think of WWI: you knew where the danger was, and where it wasn't.
Not that I know anything in particular about this piece of military jargon, but that's my contextually-informed supposition.
Add to all of that: this started as a war of conquest. Putin seems to have believed that Russian forces would quickly take Kiev, depose the government, and install a client regime in its place. You don't want to destroy property you think you'll shortly own, so there would have been no point stocking up enough munitions to do so.
The airport raid by SF on the first day of the war arguably came close to success.
At least that would be honest....
I got that notification a few days ago: "Reserve your username!" Every username I tried - based first of all around my very-uncommon real-name" - that did NOT have numbers at the end of it was either already taken (fair enough) or else "reserved for Business account holders", and Would I like to upgrade? It's a monetization push.
Of course. Regions and cultures and families varied all over the place - and still do today. I wasn't trying to make any kind of universal claim, just explaining how our social group handled the "but what do you do about younger kids?" question the GP asked.
Yah. Screen time (and, once I got older, specifically video games) caused a lot of parental angst amongst my peer-group's parents, too. My family didn't have a TV, so I read lots of books. Funnily enough, I (later) ran across Victorian-era think-pieces about how books were damaging to young people for all of the same reasons that people are (now, and back when we were kids) concerned about screens.
By the way, this same subject came up in another thread a few days ago, and I had this to say:
If that's a serious question, it's because as printed scores are also communicating the game situation. It could be as simple as
End of day three: NZ 558 - Eng 354
I can't remember where I read it, but I recall a distinction being made between "open" games and "patterned" games. "Open" games, like football, have very few repetitive elements: action is continuous, and every possession is entirely different (eg, ball and players at different starting positions) than the next. Cricket has discontinuous action, and each passage of play begins in the same manner. "Open" games are difficult to notate, and not much about the game itself can be inferred from the scoreline alone; for instance, in your example, the Mariners might have dominated possession, had multiple shots turned away, and felt unlucky in defeat - or else the complete opposite! "Patterned" games are easier to notate, and more about them can be efficiently communicated, because there's much more shared state. Chess, the ultimate patterned game, can be written down in a more-or-less complete form for later study!
[Edit: Please take this thread into the MC weeds! Lol. I want to see HN heads explode.)
I'm of an age to have grown up like that, and one of the real drags was having to take my 3-5 year-old sibling along on whatever activity the rest of us were up to. ("But mom, we're building a fort - do I have to?") The other kids with younger siblings did the same. As I recall, at five I wasn't to leave the yard by myself, but as a mixed-age group of ~3-11 year-olds, yeah: we ran around all over the place together. The older kids took on responsibility for the younger ones.
So, yeah, that's eighties suburbia, and my sister wasn't less than two. On the other hand, if there'd been a larger age difference (and, maybe if I'd been a girl? My mum was more progressive about gender roles than most of her contemporaries, but still) I expect she'd have been entrusted to me earlier. Starting at the age of ~4 I'd been left alone with my sister for up to an hour while she napped, with the instruction to run next door to get my mother if she woke up.
By the way, I think all of that was fine.
Hell, yes. (Not GP.)
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out on a Friday and came back to his exact same desk on Monday, with a new "employer" and a higher salary.
What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's nowhere to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.
Well-made leather shoes have none of those drawbacks (besides polishing; nothing to do about that). When I was in high school my grandmother bought me a pair of (eye-wateringly expensive, partially hand-made) dress shoes. I can remember the style (dance-Oxford), but not the maker. I wore them for graduation, and then for another decade of restaurant and catering work. I regularly spent 10+ hours in a day in them, walking I don't know how far, and they were (with a soft-gel insole inside) as comfortable as a pair of sneakers - though indeed, not so good for running. I think I replaced the soles twice, before too much restaurant-damage on the uppers forced their retirement. More than 20 years after their demise, and I still miss them.
You're right about there being a change of attitude, particularly in the direction of mis-perceived risk - we see that in surveys about fear of crime relative to actual crime statistics - which makes parents way more leery about sending their kids outside to play on their own.
I think that's a huge mistake: there are child-development studies that suggest that it's important for kids to engage in (moderately) risk-taking play in order to develop accurate assessments of their own skills and calibrate their own internal risk models; other studies suggest that it's helpful for children's social development to spend time playing independently (of adults) in age-diverse groups of other kids. My opinion is that the parents who (e.g.) follow their kids around the playground, making sure they don't fall down and settling every squabble, are not being helpful - though not doing that sure got me dirty looks from other parents!
So, that's where at least some of the "kids aren't exploring outside" effect comes from. My own (GenX / "latchkey" / elder-millennial) cohort was arguably under-patented; now we ourselves have over-corrected with our kids. Maaaybe the idea that at-home entertainment is today more compelling or convenient has something to do with it, but I don't know: my generation was plenty compelled by TV and 8-bit Nintendo. I think we'd have spent just as much time on those as kids today spend on whatever they do on their devices now.
However, I think the primary drivers are:
1.) Fewer kids around, both per-capita and (related, but separable) per geographical area: you can't have a spontaneous neighborhood "gang" when other kids don't live nearby. Declining birth rates and increased sprawl force parents to be more involved in their kids' social lives, as transportation to / organizers of scheduled activities and formalized "play-dates". (Of course, this only increases the time-pressure on parents, and makes it even more difficult to imagine having more kids. It's a vicious cycle.)
2.) As you say, experience-maxxing. Some of this is great: parents in general seem to be way more (emotionally healthily!) involved in their kids lives than my parents' generation ever were.
(But one example: I think my parents might have attended one or two of my Little League or high school baseball games, ever. It didn't hurt my feelings at all: parents mostly didn't, and we kids mostly thought the families who came every time were kinda weird, and were a bit embarrassed for the teammates whose parents showed up. Today, I love how much support my kid and his peers receive at their games. It's fantastic. [Coming to watch practice though? Nah. That's a little too helicoptery. Parents, don't do that, unless you're volunteering to help coach the team.])
On the other hand, I think a lot of the other efforts parents make - structuring every afternoon and family weekend around doing something kid-friendly - isn't such a good thing: kids need a little boredom and a bit of independence to spark their creativity. But... For time-pressed parents, who genuinely and rightly crave interaction with their kids, those hours are precious: that's all the time you get, so the temptation to over-schedule is strong.
I think both of those factors reduce down (in large part) to time pressure. Having to work or train longer, and on top of that having to have more than one income, to be financially stable increases the (fractional) time investment, and then all of it compounds.
It's not a simple answer, but I think higher wages, better social and societal support for families, and denser built environments would all help to pull societies away from the current equilibrium. Developed countries are all well below replacement birth rates, while at the same time surveys indicate that most women have fewer children than they'd "ideally" want. There's something off kilter in the way we're living our lives, and I think it's downstream of the economic system we've collectively built.
(Sorry to hit you with these walls of text. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this since becoming a parent.)
Indeed. That's directly addressed in their definition of the rule:
No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck.
Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces
I agree with this, but I think it reinforces GP's point that what's missing is time: slack in the day. I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood kids, and the critical enabler was that there were always adults around during the after-school hours. Not actively hanging out with us, or even closely supervising, but around. Some of them (mine, but only for a few years), were stay-at-home mothers, but by no means all. One family had a dad who got home early from work. Another kid we couldn't play at their house certain days, but we could others, because their parents had variable schedules.
There were also more kids around, because families back then had more kids than they do nowadays. I think that's also (not entirely, but to a significant degree) a consequence of adults having less time - across their life-cycles, and in their days - that isn't devoted to work.
No ones' parents did gig-work, or worked two jobs. Most parents were 9-5, or maybe 8-4 (or I don't know: I was a kid, and not paying attention to things like that), but no one went to "after school care", because there were always adults around after school got out.
Hell, I think the need for third-places (for kids) mentioned in the article is a down-stream effect of the increased time pressures on adults' lives - as is the disappearance of third-places for adults.
if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air
Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?
I agree. To expand your point, that requires upstream regulation of trash incinerators (and road safety, which I'll ignore because developed economies mostly have that at least nominally in place), to make sure it's not a noxious neighbor. Where that doesn't exist, there will be pressure for (blunt force and inefficient) zoning codes to keep the smelly stuff away.
That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)
There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.
I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.
Funnily enough, I don't get seasick in heavy seas - even below deck without a horizon - but I will sitting at the dock with light motion. It's like my vestibular system "knows" to shut up when the chaotic motion goes beyond certain parameters.
Is navigation a legitimate use of a phone screen while driving? I wouldn't want the dots on my map, so I'll charitably assume that's what GP meant.
Yeah, I'm hanging on with GrapheneOS (on a Pixel) until their native-hardware (Motorola) phones come out, which hopefully will solve this. As I understand it, third-party (banks and so forth) app vendors have to accept their security attestation, which they don't right now, but (I hope) will with Motorola behind them.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% correct that the nature of good institutions is to make the virtuous path the easy one, and also that medical norms and practices do a (generally) good job achieving this.
You're also missing your interlocutor's point.
Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
Doctors very often don't do a good job with complex cases - like rare conditions, complicated histories, or multiple interacting factors - and some will treat the patient as "difficult" or "an impediment" when they (the doctor) haven't grokked the situation. Very few patients are trying to be an impediment - 99% are trying to help achieve a good outcome, though sometimes their definition of that is misguided or impossible - but it is frustrating to be treated that way by someone who genuinely knows less about your situation than you do. ("Doc, I've taken that test before, and I've tried that medication before - I know it's not in your EMR, but here is a printout - what are you looking for this time that you expect to be different than before?" That conversation doesn't always go well - and even when it does, you're likely to be told "I can't [read: hospital / insurance policy won't permit] try something else until we've done those again" - so you'll end up going back to step A with each new provider.)
In fairness to doctors, many of them work within horrible constraints: it's impossible to get a handle on a complex situation in one twenty minute appointment every six months, and there's little point trying when it's likely the patient will be reassigned to a new provider by next year, anyway. The tension between medical ethics and practice and hospital (let alone, in the US, insurance) ethics and practice is enormous, and (for the individual doctors and patients caught up in it) intractable.
When I taught university, I put every required book on reserve in the library. I also <wink-wink nudge-nudged> about "alternative methods, that you're absolutely not allowed to use. The college gets kick-backs from [book publisher], so your nerdy friend who obtains his books for free is in direct violation of that agreement, and he should absolutely not share anything with anyone in this class".
I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.
Fun! I mix white and whole-wheat flour, which we think tastes better. Half and half, and up the baking powder by ~50%.
Good points. I expect you're familiar with the Abundance Agenda folks? They're mostly talking right now about energy and infrastructure, which I think is a correct choice, but there is a next step to take with consumer goods, so that we can end up with an abundance of quality and not more engineered addiction.