mmoche

Not only was it not "required," nearly 30% of the state of California remains short of full vaccination and restrictions are dropping daily.

You can demand an end to "mandates" and public health emergencies, but you must then applaud when those things end.

Extremely typical. There are cases where the highest paid employee in an entire _state_ is an athletics coach at a state university.

I am confused as to why "repair the thing before it catastrophically fails" is not the best of the available options. Decommissioning a facility like this is a loss for science globally, even if there are alternatives available. Telescope time is precious.

Spend time with your neighbors and local businesses. That goes a long way. Learn more about what works well in the city, and what doesn't. Consider serving in a volunteer capacity with various organizations like local neighborhood councils or schools. Most importantly, if you can devote time, money, or both to local schools, you will make the biggest impact there.

Have kids? Send your kids to the local public school. That is an enormous difference maker. Don't push for dumb things (e.g. Latin), but be an effective advocate for students whose parents might be unable to get involved, and contribute time and energy to improving resources across the board.

There are many issues. Perhaps the most obvious is that parents cannot teach their children and work simultaneously, while children accustomed to the classroom setting are unable to focus on a task independently at home. Either the attempts at schooling or the attempts at working are dropped - dropping the schooling seems like the better choice for families that need a paycheck.

I don't think the implication is that "fully/100% remote" is inherently good, but that it is an important quality to a population. For example, I only seek fully remote work, so knowing that a position is 100% remote is critical to my search when looking at jobs.

This is the Nanit monitor with the Breathing Wear band. The cost is significant - $300 for the monitor, $20+ for the band, and an annual fee after the first year. With that said, an IP-enabled monitor lets you do things like spend time outside the range of a non-IP camera (e.g. on vacation, go to the hotel pool while the baby naps), things I find extremely valuable. Naturally, there is a privacy impact that should be carefully considered.

We use a baby monitor in conjunction with specifically patterned clothing. The monitor observes the pattern and assesses whether the baby is breathing - if not, it will alarm on both the phone and the crib monitor unit.

Is it strictly necessary? No. But it helps me sleep, and that means the baby sleeps better because he's not being visited and monitored by a human.

We've had one false positive in 6 months. That's an acceptable tradeoff, in my mind.

Those in a position of relative power (e.g. airline employees) are not allowed to ask "what disease do you have that merits this animal?" but they are allowed to ask "what services does this animal provide?" There is a clear and obvious distinction between those questions, and the answer to the second question will clearly identify those who require exceedingly well-trained and expensive service animals. People who want to carry their dogs onboard without paying a fee are less likely to have an answer.

I understand that it's difficult to do correctly, but it has been done correctly in the past, on a few occasions (e.g. the scattered-site developments in Yonkers, NY).

It just seems like we've completely given up, and I'm not sure if that's something that has been politically ordained or if we just aren't interested in trying again.

Why don't we build public housing in the US anymore?

Where in LA is your LA office?

All of its residents.

Depends on the HOV lane. The Fastrak lanes on the 110 south of downtown are regularly moving at 45+ mph, regardless of the state of the other lanes. There are two HOV lanes each direction, often separated by grade.

Sure, but the freight companies own the track, so they prioritize their own trains.

I have not yet lived in a metro area in the United States where traffic is not bad, particularly at rush hours. Try getting from Boston to Cambridge any time outside the early morning hours. Or Seattle to Tukwila.

Even if they had the power, or will, governments in ostensibly free nations shouldn't be forcing their population into a form of transport, just as they shouldn't be forcing their population into specific jobs, specific homes, or specific religions.

Got it. It may be an indicator.

I do also think that one of the obligations of any large public project is to ensure that it reflects the public - art is a good way to do this.

For what it's worth, art does not typically contribute meaningfully to cost. In Boston, a budgeted $2 billion dollar expansion of the Green Line is now projected to cost nearly $3 billion, and the response from the MBTA has been to cut $2 million worth of art installations.[0]

There are plenty of issues, but calling out public art as an example of waste is shortsighted given its minuscule costs.

[0]https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mbta-suddenly-c...

The colors are bad for this visualization, but were chosen because the Los Angeles Lakers wear those colors, and Bryant spent his entire career with the team.

My favorite part of their anti-adblocker approach was when I actually disabled my blocker and ran into a hilarious "ad-light"[0] experience that was so ad-heavy I immediately gave up and found somewhere else to read an article. Countless "sponsored" article links, old-timey banner ads, and 75% of the visible page devoted to items other than content.

[0]https://twitter.com/mmoche/status/710167616535531520

I agree that that is a puzzling statement.

Perhaps the intent was to say something like "you can't reap marginal benefits from the replacement of a single signal since the whole system must be modernized to allow the advanced signalling afforded by new technology," or something.

Your conclusion is worrisome. Lots of people, and lots of groups of people, have been considered "violent criminals" despite being neither violent nor criminals.

I can understand why worldwide empathy is a good thing regardless of how it could, conceivably, benefit those who would use it for nefarious purposes.

That's the joke. Dade was utilizing social engineering to obtain information from a security guard.

Realistic or not, it's a great example of how technology is never stronger than its weakest link, and often that link is human.

As a longtime (but not current) resident of Los Angeles, merely growing up in traffic very effectively desensitized me to the misery of long commute times. To the degree that the natives have factored in sunk time in the car, a lot of what you see is adaptation to circumstance.

Also, housing prices in LA preclude lots of folks from moving closer to work despite the commute pain. I'd expect that's the biggest reason. I had a history teacher in high school who commuted from Lancaster to the San Fernando Valley every day.

Interestingly, I find traffic in my present domicile of Boston unbearable, but regular trips back to LA don't inspire the same sort of feelings despite the average commute time and distance being longer while I am in California. I guess you just get used to conditions in a location and don't carry those expectations to different places.

All of the things you're describing are attributable to bad implementation of the basic idea that building software is not like building physical machines.

Scrum, or any other agile SDLC, can do the things you describe above. It can also do none of them.

Scrum has a place, like anything else, and is not objectively bad, as much as you may dislike the principle. There are plenty of people who are neither misled, stupid, or malevolent, who like scrum and apply it where it is appropriate, which is not everywhere.

Trust is a two-way street. Not all engineers have low respect for managers and vice-versa. Many of us have regular discussions which effect real change at our organizations, discussions built on mutual trust and devoid of kneejerk reactions to SDLC philosophies or management styles.

I think the goal would be to scale desalination efforts to the point where it can replace groundwater pumping statewide. This would come at a huge cost, sure, but once the groundwater runs out, the economics won't look so bad.

Agreed. Particularly for California which has heavy energy and water needs, nuclear desalination seems like the most future-proof approach, particularly considering the dramatic decrease in aquifer volume as groundwater is extracted to make up for drought-level rainfall.

An app that reduces photo memory requirements is a nice start, but the only long-lasting solution to this problem is by allowing the hardware to accept memory upgrades.

It's a pipe dream to expect Apple to allow external storage on their phones, so this is likely to be the last iPhone I own. It's simply not a tenable situation.