sien

Community radio is still alive and well in Australia too.

RRR and PBS in Melbourne are still excellent and seem to still be a fairly big deal if bumper stickers are anything to go by.

A Kindle really helps me. I don't do anything else other than read with it.

As does Goodreads and reviewing, for myself, every book I read.

Logging out of social media on phones is a good idea.

OK.

It does have a real time spell checker. But it doesn't seem to have the squiggly line. The screen blinks at you when you type a word it can't find.

I've just run Prowrite 2 and 3.1.1 via FS-UAE.

So my memory is wrong about that feature have a red squiggly line.

It did have realtime checking. Also Prowrite was WYSIWYG. The realtime checking is neat, but it's actually a bit annoying with the blink. The red squiggly line is a better way to show that there is an unrecognised word.

Thanks for getting me to check.

The 'check continuously' is the thing.

I'm going to run it and have a look in a bit and get back to you.

It looks like 1st Word on the Atari ST also have a continuous spell checker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Word

From the link for 1st Word :

"Among the many new features was a spell checker with a 40,000 word dictionary, although lacking many American English terms,[11] a mail merge program, footnotes and semi-automated hyphenation.[12] The spell checker included the relatively rare, for the time, option to check on-the-fly. It also added document statistics display, including the number of characters, pages, etc"

Honestly I'd guess it's one of those things that possibly originated at Xerox Parc and then got added to consumer products from the 1980s onwards.

Personally, I remember it because I remember seeing Word 6 and thinking 'at last they have caught up to Prowrite'.

Prowrite on the Amiga had a real time spell checker before Word did.

Possibly there were other programs that did as well prior to that.

But Prowrite did it and had a red squiggly line under incorrect words.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue123/P215_1_REVIE...

If you look at US share of energy consumption by source you can see that solar is 2.83% of energy used in the US. Natural gas is 34.2% .

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

The average house in the UK now has 1.3 laptops.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/09/online-al...

A windows laptop from today is vastly easier to code on that a C64 or whatever. Most houses would have an internet connection as well so they can get to all sorts of things.

A Raspberry Pi is probably something richer kids get to play with.

Have you had a look at Scratch?

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Primary School kids today in Australia often get a Chromebook and have some tutoring in Scratch. Again, it gets you the ideas of coding in a way that more kids will get.

You mention the lack of alternatives that got you and other kids into coding. That's probably a thing. There is so much more entertainment available today that most kids probably don't get bored like kids did in the past and sat down and learnt to code. It has to be more intentional.

When I was a kid my mum was a teacher and brought home a computer over the school holidays which had no games. I taught myself databases and spreadsheets because there was a good tutorial on that.

There is also probably something in that until, say, the 2010s computers were not quite ubiquitous enough that they were a constant part of kids lives. Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s there was something almost magical about the devices. A kid today who grows up in a household with smartphones, tablets, laptops and multiple smart TVs probably won't get the same thrill about moving an object around a screen as someone did 30+ years ago.

Check out 'Coding for Beginners Using Python' by Osborne.

Also have a look at 'Coding Projects in Python' by DK books.

Both these books are excellent and would enable a smart and determined 11 year old to learn to code.

To be honest these books teach coding in a way that is much easier than it was in your day. You can also jump on many, many websites and teach yourself how to code.

You're also an exception. Many, many kids read those old Osborne books and only a very tiny fraction like yourself became coders and an even smaller fraction became as successful as yourself.

Metafilter and Something Awful both do this.

Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users.

A small cost does definitely work for some sites.

Thanks for recommending this book.

I'm now about half way through. It's really good.

A copy for people who want to read the article :

https://archive.md/Q0DYu

Yep.

Creating a good story, getting good actors and getting it all to come together is hard and still costs millions. At the end you may also not get your money back

Take 'I Swear', a very good recent film. It's well worth a watch.

It's made 8.3M. Has it made the money back?

It's not going to compete with 'The Mandalorian and Sidekick'.

That's likely to make several hundred million and still be fairly poor.

Yep. It's a very good book and well worth a read.

It's interesting to see how upset people are on Goodreads about that book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624737-not-the-end-of...

The top reviews are mostly people angry with Ritchie for not being a catastrophist.

In Australia it's 'Street Library'

https://streetlibrary.org.au/

Do they have other names in different countries?

Fascinating.

It appears to be the world's second busiest checkpoint now though if you count the Macau to China checkpoint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_checkpoint#Busiest_chec...

Yeah. It's a remarkable problem. There is a clear solution that is happily used for men. You tell people what to measure then have the clothes sized for the various dimensions.

Charles Tyrwhitt have this guide where they tell you what to measure for shirts :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/size-guides/szg-formal-sh...

and for trousers :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/szg-trousers-4-2021.html

Presumably some online shops for women have something similar?

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

Under construction :

Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, Japan, South Korea and more.

Poland is going to start building soon too.

I always enjoy the color you add to these conversations in your newsletter.

It's provided many a chuckle.

Thanks!

France, Sweden and Ontario exist.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/12mo/monthly

It literally has been done.

That's very true.

Singapore has done extremely well economically.

But it's not cool. That's something else.

Tokyo, for example, is cool, fashion, music, films and computer games come out of Tokyo.

But that's very hard to say of Singapore.

Perhaps it's like Luxembourg and Lisbon.

Admittedly the link at the top is from Marginal Revolution where 'cool' may mean economically successful and interesting for policy makers.

SeiscomP could perhaps be used :

https://www.seiscomp.de/

It's mentioned here by the CTBTO

https://www.ctbto.org/node/9348

Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product has been roughly stable for more than half a century.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

The top quintile of income earners in the US pay 34% of all taxes. The next quintile 26% .

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/who-pays-taxe...

US Federal spending was 7 Trn in 2025. This is surely enough to fund things.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

That is more than the total GDP of any country except China and the US itself.

One of the biggest things though is housing.

The US, Australia and probably most developed countries have declining productivity in construction.

(1985) https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w1555/w1555...

(2025) https://www.nber.org/digest/202502/stagnation-us-constructio...

That shouldn't be tied to China. Indeed arguably China might help with cheaper materials potentially.

To explain this for anyone else like me who hadn't heard the term.

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

Full Text On the Net = FUTON.

Not according to wikipedia :

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

In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999.[30] Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.[31]

Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt[32] and after Chávez's re-election in 2006.[32][33] In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president.[2] According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.[15]

The Venezuelan refugee crisis has a lot to do with Chavismo.

I pay. I've found it's worth it.

Yeah. Absolutely. Access and Visual Basic was the one low code platform that really worked.

The Apache foundation or someone ought to target that as a proper Open Source setup.

Low code means you have to pay a company every time someone in your organisation runs an app.

Libraries + Frameworks doesn't mean that unless you're bonkers.

LLMs + Libraries + Frameworks means you might pay to build the application, but running it is only going to be the cost of where it's running.

You're exactly right.

I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was.

I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.

A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :

Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/

Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world

https://www.noahpinion.blog/

Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/

Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/

The thing to look at is C02 equivalent emissions from electricity generation.

Despite Australia's high solar and battery penetration Australia's electricity generation is fairly high emissions.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/5y/monthly

France and Sweden have considerably lower emission electricity generation than Australia does.