True story: I moved from southern California to Holland in no small part because of how amenable the country is to cycling.
People like to think that cycling is popular here naturally because the country is flat and densely populated. However, it's easy to forget that during the postwar boom years, a major shift toward cars happened and it took a concerted effort of willful resistance and politically non-expedient measures to bring back the bike paths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o). Clearly, 1897 was not the last chance the Dutch had to fix their transit system, and with the groundwork they've laid over the years, it now costs only €30 per person in funding annually! (http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/05/487-million-eur...)
Yet I see very little chance of this happening in California, not because cyclists lack a voice, but because we need to create more disincentives to driving. This obviously is a political no-go considering that motorists are by far the majority demographic. It's saddening, though, that there is so much willful ignorance (or apathy) with regard to how we've externalized the true cost of driving, whether it's in the form of:
- damage to the environment
- subsidy to cheap gas prices by the DoD budget (and body count) for controlling the world's oil flow
- casualties from motor vehicle accidents
- health problems resulting from sedentary lifestyles
- zoning rules that require abundant free parking to be available in communities.
We'd probably have to see gas hit $10/gallon and parking lots charge $50/day before Americans start to reconsider. (These prices are actually quite typical in European cities.)
Oddly enough, I think it's good that the Great Recession has caused a lot of Americans to reconsider their car expenses and choose to scale back their lifestyles in ways that are more healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly. I hope this trend (not the recession, of course) continues and if America can set an example of moving away from a car culture, it will do far more good around the world to discourage the growing middle class in China, India, and other developing countries from adopting the same wasteful practices.
In the meantime, though, I'll piggyback on the 40-year head start on bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands. If I sound bitter, it's my sore legs from yesterday's 70km ride talking ;)
I moved from Mountain View to Portland for basically the same reason. While Portland isn't anywhere near Dutch levels of biking, the city government takes it seriously enough that I hope it will be nice by the time my daughter is old enough to not drive.
I agree with your assessment that we "need to create more disincentives to driving" and that is the part that is getting the most resistance.
I think the best arguments we can make are selfish ones. Safety, and the damage cars do to communities by taking humans off the streets. Health. Cost.
As a parent who grew up in Suburbia, I think the best thing that I can do for my child is to move to an urban bike-friendly city, because the number one cause of deaths by far for teenagers in the US is motor vehicle crashes.
In 2012 we took a long road trip through the most bike friendly cities in the US, and settled on Portland. Our first choice was actually Vancouver, BC but its hard for American citizens to emigrate there unless you have a sponsor.
We considered staying in Atlanta and fighting for the type of changes it needs to become a real livable city, but ultimately we decided that it wasn't worth risking our lives and that our energy could be much better spent cultivating the critical mass needed to reach a tipping point in Portland's low-car lifestyle.
Respectfully, I think your analysis is overly simplistic. You ignored the elephant in the room: the geography of the US.
Cycling makes a ton of sense if you live in and around an urban area---particularly when most of your interactions with other people are in that same small area. Despite my love for driving, if I fit that mold, I'd happily adopt cycling as my main mode of transportation. But there are a couple of very common scenarios in the US that maybe aren't so common in other countries:
* Living in a suburb/rural area that is more than a half-hour drive from your place of work (in no traffic). There's a high price to pay in terms of time that cycling would entail.
* Traveling throughout the US. And I don't just mean across the country where trains or buses are appropriate---I mean visiting your friend several towns over. For instance, my friend that I frequently visit is about 30 minutes away by car but is about 100 minutes away by bicycle (back-roads, no traffic, data from Google Maps). Similarly for my parents.
I think both of these scenarios strongly militate toward owning a car in favor of a bicycle. I also think tons of people in the US fit this mold---certainly more so than smaller countries with a much denser overall population. Most of the people in the US live in cities---but the overall population density of the US is much lower than most other countries, which suggests that even if you live in or around a city, you have a much higher chance of having connections with people who live in more suburban or rural areas (than similar folks in denser countries). When that happens, a car is typically the most sensible form of transportation.
Of course, it's certainly plausible that we could own cars that we rarely use but cycle to work every day, for example. But I think that's a more complex dynamic and I don't think I have the tools to properly analyze it.
I also find your enthusiasm for passing laws to legislate your cost/benefit analysis on everyone else to be deeply disturbing, but I'll leave that one be.
> Living in a suburb/rural area that is more than a half-hour drive from your place of work (in no traffic).
That this situation is so common is a symptom of the fact that our cities and towns have been designed around driving. The geography of the US is a comparatively small factor, since (as you mention) most people here live in cities or suburbs.
> When that happens, a car is typically the most sensible form of transportation.
For these sorts of occasional needs, car sharing services work well.
> I also find your enthusiasm for passing laws to legislate your cost/benefit analysis on everyone else to be deeply disturbing, but I'll leave that one be.
This assumes that the status quo doesn't already constitute legislating one group's cost/benefit analysis on everyone else.
> That this situation is so common is a symptom of the fact that our cities and towns have been designed around driving.
I live outside Boston. Which was most certainly not designed for driving. And yet, my analysis holds there too.
> The geography of the US is a comparatively small factor, since (as you mention) most people here live in cities or suburbs.
I think you've taken what I said out of context. I went on to qualify that by saying those people, due to the lower overall population density, have a decent chance of knowing people in suburbs/rural areas that they visit.
> For these sorts of occasional needs, car sharing services work well.
In urban areas, yes. In suburb/rural areas, no. My friend had a similar dilemma, and her solution was to rent a car. Plausible, but is of varying pain depending upon use cases. Her use case was "I need a car infrequently but for long stretches of time."
> This assumes that the status quo doesn't already constitute legislating one group's cost/benefit analysis on everyone else.
No it doesn't. I said nothing about the status quo. I didn't even argue in favor of the status quo.
Do you acknowledge that geography plays a big role in the viability of cycling as a primary mode of transportation? From your response, I can only assume that you don't. If my assumption is right, then I suggest we focus the conversation on that.
Your also assuming an ether or situation if you drive less having a cheaper car seems more reasonable. I bought a 30k car back when I spent 2 hours a day in it, now that I drive ~2 hours a week and kind of wish I had bought a Honda civic instead.
I visited Amasterdam (from Chicago) in November of last year, and fell in love with the cycling-centric environment in Hollad. How difficult is it to pick up and move to Holland from the US?
Interestingly the US has a special treaty with the Netherlands for starting a business called the DAFT (Dutch-American Friendship Treaty)[1] that gives Americans preferential treatment compared to other non-EU nationals. I have no idea about the other legal hurdles.
Probably needs some adjustment or moderator intervention in the near term. I just tried a moment ago; you can still submit a pages.github.com URL and HN will mark the domain as github.com, but it will redirect to github.io when you follow the link.
Indeed, it's not like there are an endless number of common subdomains which don't convey much information. "www" is one, "blog" is another. That's about it.
The problem wasn't anticipated, and the fix has been to enable showing subdomains on only on certain domains, mainly blog hosts like wordpress, blogspot, tumblr.
A friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything.
Scarily, even mentioning this brings flashbacks of when I was part of an entire team that was ruined by it. The pattern that emerged was that a particular senior architect who had the ear of management was perceived as the 10X contributor, even though the misdirection and hostility from him reduced the rest of the team to 1/10 productivity. Most of the other developers were entirely capable but realized the complete futility of their efforts in the face of this kind of management.
Maybe not for multi-family condos, but the Dutch seem to have a great time with their shipping containers. This student housing complex is quite popular:
Granted, affordable housing is in short supply in the Netherlands, while there's plenty of shipping containers considering that Rotterdam is the biggest port in Europe.
In Chinese the fraction 355/113 has been known as the 密率 ("detailed ratio") and 22/7 as the 约率 ("approximate ratio"). It is documented in the Book of Sui, volume 16:
While it suggests that the value was calculated around the end of the Liu Song Dynasty (~479 CE) by Zu Chongzhi to have an upper bound of 3.1415927 and lower bound of 3.1415926, the 密法 method is not explained.
It has been thought that Zu may have used a "method of averaging days" to calculate an intermediate value between two prior known approximations of 22/7 and 157/50 [2]. Not a very satisfying result for anyone who wants to find something special in the numbers 355 and 113.
One of the things that really attracted me was Snow Crash's very 90s idea that your plot of land in the Metaverse was run from your own computer. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and now everything is moving to the cloud.
Hey, the cloud is always online and my instances are mine. If I were running my website from my computer, it would be down every time I went into the subway.
no, they'll take over minecraft. Much better to take a ridiculously simple system where anyone can build anything, and grow it into the full 3d design system of second life.
I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me
</shameless plug>
It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.
I welcome this move, despite the possibility of some fallout from the change. It'll be painful, but even as someone who once made a living writing ActionScript, I have to say that Flash is sufficiently annoying and insecure that it really needs to be phased out.
In the short term, this will probably cause some breakage in certain sites that try to use Flash "transparently" and "unobtrusively" for things like LSOs, drag-and-drop, clipboard access, or cross-domain XHR. These are already problematic with Flashblock installed though -- Pandora, for instance, refuses to load and there is nothing available to click-to-play since that particular Flash object is hidden.
Hopefully this will light a fire under those sites and get them to update to the appropriate HTML5 methods of doing these things (local storage, WebSockets, etc.), just like how Java applets that were used for such things have been largely phased out. Until then, however, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them simply inform you not to use Firefox to visit.
To take care of the invisible Flash object problem, Firefox could copy what Chrome does for Java applets and have a bar pop up at the top of the whole page, asking if you want to allow Flash to run on the site in question.
Pandora uses jPlayer to play audio which has an invisible Flash component to play mp3s on browsers that don't support it.
If Firefox requires 'click-to-play' on an on-screen piece of Flash to enable it, all sites using jPlayer to play mp3 simply will not work.
And of course this doesn't just affect jPlayer, many other players use this technique.
Much better -- as mistercow reasons -- to have a pop-up asking you if you wish to run Flash on a particular site and I would love to see an 'always allow' option here.
TL;DR there is a licensing issue with the MP3 decoder. It's more complicated than that, but most of it is due to software patents. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#section_10 has more info if you're curious.
I use Chromium, and have old flash installed. Every page shows me this bar asking me to update flash, with button to enable all flash on this page. It's very convenient, even more than FlashBlock on Firefox was.
No it's not, because if the Flash object is invisible, it simply does not give you any way to enable them unless you go to the preferences and explicitly add an exception.
This was my entire point in the first place, if you look up at the beginning of the thread. For example, turn on click-to-play and then go to pandora.com. If Chrome treated Flash the same as Java, you would still be able to use pandora easily.
read his post again. he's not talking about the click-to-play ui. there's a puzzle piece icon in the taskbar. clicking it displays a drop-down menu, and even if the flash is invisible you can choose the "enable flash on this page" option.
A problem I found with Chrome's current implementation is on pages where you don't even know flash is being used, Google Translate and Soundcloud for example, after thinking the site was broken I remembered I had click-to-enable active.
Indeed, this happens to me too. And I think this is why Mozilla will need to have a very good UI to tell the user how to fix a broken site (or just fix it for them e.g. through a crowd collective).
That's not a problem because Firefox has support for CORS, which is better than doing Flash because it's faster.
Of course, the server must cooperate with the browser by passing back allowance headers, but that's also true for Flash, as you need the server to have a crossdomain policy file for that.
> That's not a problem because Firefox has support for CORS, which is better than doing Flash because it's faster.
That's nice for a new site being developed right now, it's problematic for a site which has been stable in production for months or years and for which everybody involved in the development has moved on already.
If that site is the case, then lack of maintenance will have reared its ugly head long before a lack of Flash (or, the inclusion of it) broke their site.
horse-and-cart didn't stop working when the automobile came around. The proposal here is that we shoot all horses and burn all carts because somebody somewhere has started driving an automobile.
As an alternative, rather than requiring that all Flash shims have some sort of screen real-estate of their own to overlay a click-to-play control onto, perhaps hidden embedded Flash (or Java, or ActiveX, or whatever) objects could request the browser to prompt for their activation with an information bar.
I was thinking of postMessage, I haven't used CORS before but it looks like it ends up giving the same kind of outcome. In my case though I control the server have have the JS on 3rd parties so it is the reverse to what you are saying.
Minus a couple of restrictions (i.e. with CORS you cannot rely on cookies being set, so you need to handle that from your Javascript somehow), CORS works well and it works on all major browsers, starting with IExplorer 8, which makes it awesome.
For this feature, there will also be an option to enable plugins for websites that have them hidden such as Pandora. And in addition it will be possible to whitelist/blacklist websites.
Story of my life, Ed. I am your poster boy who lives "cheap" and not "frugal" by choice. I clip coupons and browse slickdeals before committing to a purchase. I never buy anything at MSRP. I monitor airfare prices for weeks before booking a ticket.
This is a difficult problem to escape because it's one that I behaved myself into, and that it's self-reinforcing for a variety of reasons:
- When you're already on a fixed salary, the opportunity cost of spending time on being cheap is not obvious. You're not taking time away from that $500/hr side consulting gig that you don't have. Instead, you're at a situation where the marginal rate of return on clipping coupons (say, $10/hr) is significantly better than spending the next hour working on that iPhone app that is months from release and has no interested buyers (how long is it going to take to recoup the Apple developer fee?).
- Some people get a rush out of saving money, a feeling of "Ha! I beat the system." To them, saving money is a form of entertainment [1], and there's certainly far worse hobbies to have from a well-being perspective. Unfortunately, there are people who take this too far and end up as total misers or compulsive hoarders. I'm not a pathological case, but I've done things that would make some people cringe.
- Seeing people successfully live frugally can be a motivator to follow in their path. My parents are immigrants who worked hard and saved for 20 years before they were finally able to afford a house in an expensive neighborhood (and nearly paid for it all in cash). They drive Toyotas, shop at Costco, and cook at home. They are basically the epitome of the "millionaire next door" [2].
- There's also a moral justification for this. "Why do I have to keep up with my spendthrift neighbors? So what if I don't drive a Maserati or carry a Hermès bag? No thanks, I shall be comfortable in my own skin, since envy and greed are evil." This is now an identity statement [3], and while it's a good position to take from a financial perspective, it can be crippling in the way it makes some people closed-minded. Of course, this doesn't necessarily stop them from pontificating about retirement at 30.
I do still think that my years of being cheap are starting to pay off, mostly because I'm finally getting comfortable with the sort of "discretionary" expenses you mentioned in your post. The difference is that it probably took a much larger bank balance for me to consider them "affordable." I just flew across the continent purely on a whim to visit some friends that I hadn't seen in years, I no longer cringe at expensive bar tabs if they were time well spent with buddies, I can afford to make an impulse electronics purchase just to see what it's like, and I'm preparing for that self-funded sabbatical [4] to reboot my life.
Was it worth it? Well, it was really, really hard to re-orient myself this way, and it took much more sacrifice than necessary, but the good news is that aside from lost time, most of the rest hopefully can be recovered.
Well I would say that savings driven life is far better than the spendthrift side of things. Now this is purely personal choice. No denying.
In my case I like to sit on piles of cash, without any debts and EMI's to pay. And loan interests to worry about. I like to live a tension free life at the same time get a realization that I'm getting rich. And if you do so, you actually see that a lot of luxuries come a little late, but they come at zero stress, worries and hassles to worry about. The lateness in affording things is often very differential and in my case at least has made very little difference. Over the years you are far better off having money, peace and tranquility in your life even if you drive the Mercedes two years late. Than having a Mercedes right now and all the while paying off debts endlessly in cycles(Home, Credit card etc).
Now the point is simple, I don't really understand the spend thrift part of the world. Just because I don't dine at a seven star hotel eating a sever course meal, I doesn't mean I'm not eating well. I eat whatever I like, drink whatever I like and wear whatever I like. I just don't fall for the brands and buy 1 get two free kinda stuff.
I can go with the same phone for some years provided that server the job for the moment. Which most of the times it does. I don't see any reason to have credit card(Yes I don't have a credit card at all). Its just if you don't succumb to peer pressure and blindly imitating others spending patterns. You sort of can end up saving really lots of money. With savings and investments you can really end up making a lot after a while.
And then you can buy everything your want, retire early. Buy your dream home and live well.
In fact this is more pleasurable than the other approach.
Debt is a dangerous thing. I don't think the same about governments. But I consider debt to be disastrous for individuals.
The reason is simple a lot of your work, time and energy drains into paying the most scary thing invented by finance industry so far - 'Compound Interest'. This is especially dangerous in the case of credit card. The debt keeps mounting because of two reason, you being unable to pay and yet still continuing to borrow money. This sort of a spending patters brings a lot of pain to people every where.
And all of this for what? Upgrading from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4s. Is this really worth?
In this sort of set up people living with a savings driven life get a automatic lead ahead of spendings driven people.
Because while you are working to pay off the interest money. He works for the same time and saves that interest money.
I think it will be safe to say to say that if your paying X% money as interest to bank by working for hours Y(Remember you are loosing X% money, thereby in effect rendering your Y hours of work useless, as though it never happenned). The same X% is the money earned by the savings driven guy in the same Y hours(Additional to the money he is already earning. So this his extra income).
You work to loose money and he works to get rich. Although both work for the same time. One gets richer other gets poorer. This is how bad debt can inflict suffering on you.
These days you can be relatively rich by just saving money! And avoiding debt.
I think the lack of understand about borrowing to fund an asset, versus borrowing to fund lifestyle. If it is going to return higher than the interest rate you are borrowing at, then cool. If, in the case of a house, it is cheaper than renting (without a high risk of capital value falling putting you into liquidity diffulties), then also cool.
Borrowing for consumption is where people make the mistake.
Don't forget however that you still have to have a roof over your head. Assuming you have close to $0 net worth when you graduate, you still have to lose money, be it over a mortgage or over renting.
So, the question is, which is cheaper? Your mortgage, or your landlord?
Money let's you trade things you don't mind doing and stuff you don't need for things you want other people to do and stuff you want to have. Clipping coupons can pay 1000$ an hour or 1.5$ an hour but the important thing is not just ROI but how much you like or dislike doing things. But with stuff there is a third option. I don't listen to music so the cost of a CD or concert ticket is irrelevant to me. I don't like to travel so the cost of a plane ticket is irrelevant, I don't like posters, nick nacks, or buying clothes so most stores simply don't have anything I want to buy.
So, when you see someone that saves most of their money don't assume they are hording it, some people just don't find all that many things they want to trade it for at a price they are willing to pay. Now I like playing video games, but I have several of them unopened new in box so I don't feel the need to buy yet another one that may or may not get played etc. I have cable TV, but I spend far more time playing free flash games not because they are cheap but because I simply enjoy them more. http://www.kongregate.com/games/light_bringer777/learn-to-fl...
I think it was a post on HN awhile back that got me thinking like this. If I don't want to do it, and the opportunity cost for me is greater than the cost to hire someone else to do it, then I should just pay them. The key here is the opportunity cost is for me, not for anyone else. For example, I hate mowing the lawn and I estimate I'd have to be paid well over $100 to get me to "enjoy" doing it. Thus, I pay the $60 for lawn service. To me, I just earned $40 of my time back. Now, I'll admit, it isn't as cost effective as being cheap or "frugal", but I do think I enjoy life a bit more.
Programmers beware! You need to be especially careful with converting geodetic lat/lon/alt coordinates to and from other systems, particularly with the Earth-centered, Earth-fixed system (basically a Cartesian x,y,z coordinate grid). Do it incorrectly, and you might find yourself buried under several meters of dirt ;)
All too often I've come across code that started out by assuming a spherical Earth (wrong!) or trying to compensate by multiplying by a factor to adjust for the oblation (still wrong!). Doing this calculation accurately is very much non-trivial and still a topic of active research in geodesy.
Fortunately, there's libraries to do the hard work for you:
It gets better still! Did you know that GPS data and KML (Google Earth's format), despite both using the WGS84 spheroid, are not compatible? GPS computes altitude above the spheroid (shape of the earth), while KML requires altitude above the geoid (shape of the sea). These differ by several hundred feet in many areas. (The geoid is 30 m below the ellipsoid where I am.)
But wait there's more! Just using lat/long and ignoring elevation? Guess what, the verticals for GPS and KML differ too! GPS looks down a line normal to the spheroid; KML looks down a line normal to the geoid (in the direction of gravity). Those are almost always different. So unless your GPS readings were taken at sea level, your data's still wrong!
The picture here explains what's going on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid#Description The "plumb lines" are what are used by KML; the other lines are what are used by GPS. Notice how they point to different locations...
(P.S. I'm not a GIS-icist, but this comes from experience of collecting and correcting GPS data and reading spec sheets. I'd love if an actual GIS or Google person told me I was wrong but I'm not holding my breath.)
People like to think that cycling is popular here naturally because the country is flat and densely populated. However, it's easy to forget that during the postwar boom years, a major shift toward cars happened and it took a concerted effort of willful resistance and politically non-expedient measures to bring back the bike paths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o). Clearly, 1897 was not the last chance the Dutch had to fix their transit system, and with the groundwork they've laid over the years, it now costs only €30 per person in funding annually! (http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/05/487-million-eur...)
Yet I see very little chance of this happening in California, not because cyclists lack a voice, but because we need to create more disincentives to driving. This obviously is a political no-go considering that motorists are by far the majority demographic. It's saddening, though, that there is so much willful ignorance (or apathy) with regard to how we've externalized the true cost of driving, whether it's in the form of:
- damage to the environment
- subsidy to cheap gas prices by the DoD budget (and body count) for controlling the world's oil flow
- casualties from motor vehicle accidents
- health problems resulting from sedentary lifestyles
- zoning rules that require abundant free parking to be available in communities.
We'd probably have to see gas hit $10/gallon and parking lots charge $50/day before Americans start to reconsider. (These prices are actually quite typical in European cities.)
Oddly enough, I think it's good that the Great Recession has caused a lot of Americans to reconsider their car expenses and choose to scale back their lifestyles in ways that are more healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly. I hope this trend (not the recession, of course) continues and if America can set an example of moving away from a car culture, it will do far more good around the world to discourage the growing middle class in China, India, and other developing countries from adopting the same wasteful practices.
In the meantime, though, I'll piggyback on the 40-year head start on bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands. If I sound bitter, it's my sore legs from yesterday's 70km ride talking ;)