This really opens the conversation, for me, at least, to Lorde.
I'm not following how the linked story relates to Lorde. Probably there's some news I've missed. Could you fill me (us) in?
Readit Newsashark commented on Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music newyorker.com/culture/cul... · Posted by u/nikbackm
ashark commented on Mothers who regret having children are speaking out macleans.ca/regretful-mot... · Posted by u/gerbilly
As one of those Millennials who has kids, I can tell you the push to the suburbs is mainly due to the supply of houses and the prices in cities not because they offer any better quality of living. From everyone I have talked to they would prefer not to be in the suburbs, but because for the past 60 years that is where we built all the houses for families there isn't much of an option. Take a look at housing prices for three bedroom houses and notice how big of a drop in price there is once you get outside the city. People aren't moving to the suburbs because they are better, they are moving there because that's the only thing they can afford. Developers have no incentive to build family sized houses in the city as its cuts into their profits and after decades of family flight to the suburbs there is no one on city councils to actually make zoning laws to accommodate what people want.
Also the schools. Houses in the our city in safe-by-city-standards neighborhoods are not only way more expensive (and, nonetheless, smaller) than the 'burbs, they're usually served by some of the worst schools in the area. So then you're paying for private school, on top of more expensive housing. The math for living in the city doesn't work out unless you're really rich—or don't have kids. You could maybe do it with one and not hurt your wallet too much, but the costs scale quickly with 2+.
ashark commented on Mothers who regret having children are speaking out macleans.ca/regretful-mot... · Posted by u/gerbilly
In my anecdotal evidence many of the childless couples I know seem to be composed of the happiest, healthiest, and high achieving individuals I know. I live in a large American city. It is probably different out in the boonies but I'm quite envious when I see couples in their 30's without little ones.
Those joke bumper stickers with the couple and the pile of money next to them instead of kids aren't wrong.
ashark commented on Samsung is the latest OEM to unlock FM chips in new phones arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/artsandsci
Until 5 of the stations are all playing commercials and it's pledge drive week on NPR.
Between promoting sponsors (ads), promoting their own programs (ads), and trying to get me to give them my car (ads), it seems like my local NPR station's ~25-30% ads even when it's not pledge drive week.
ashark commented on Millennials Strike Back: An Esoteric Reading of the Last Jedi firstthings.com/web-exclu... · Posted by u/jlos
Assuming this is at all serious (which I doubt), it would be a rather cynical, facile, and insipid reading of both The Last Jedi and history itself. The most egregious point (of the many to choose from that I could dissect) is the following:
> But she has absorbed the rebels’ self-serving narrative, and it prevents her from realizing that the Skywalkers and the Rebellion—or Resistance, or whatever they are calling themselves now—have no answers.
The answer is "not fascism." The Empire and First Order are fascist regimes. Fighting fascism is the answer. There is no perfect system. But systems that support the systematic oppression of all people via threat of violence are evil.
I'd say that it felt like the movie wanted Rey to join Kylo. It was what it was building to. It would have fit with the taking-an-old-thing-and-twisting-it vibe of the rest of the film. The momentum of the film seemed in that moment to strain and fail against what I assume were the limits of how far off the rails JJ/Disney would let it go. It'd have taken what was already probably the 3rd most interesting and original Star Wars movie and given it a real shot at the #2 spot (A New Hope's nigh-unassailable in its #1 position, having created the phenomenon of the multi-genre pastiche film).
ashark commented on The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks stackoverflow.blog/2018/0... · Posted by u/lainon
About to make an App using React(and react native?)
Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.)
For the next 3 months, I'll be working on this almost alone. Is it worth using some of my resources to hire a React developer?
Also, this topic implies React will be gone in about ~5 years? That sounds good for me.
> Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.)
You can still do this with React. Some of the most-common general-purpose libraries for working with React aren't that big and could be written from scratch pretty easily. If you recognize when something's entire purpose is apparently to replicate OO features while staying "purely" functional by jumping through a series of awkward hoops, you can recall that the language you're writing in does, in fact, support OOP, and avoid the library altogether by using built-in language features (I keep seeing this in the React ecosystem and it drives me nuts).
Probably use Redux because everyone and everything expects that you are. It's easy to understand if you ignore their bad terminology and go in knowing it's just an event/messaging system, more or less. Action = event. "Action creator" = anything that dispatches an event. Reducer = your event handlers. Exactly what you'd expect from an event system with centralized event handling. Utterly mundane and non-magical. Figure out how to leverage "combineReducers" to keep your file structure sane and just go. The closest thing it has to magic going on is that when an event comes through it checks to see whether any of the refs in your "state tree" changed as a result of that event, and triggers re-renders on relevant connected view(s) (React views, in your case). That's it. Note that with a very little creativity one can decouple one's Redux code and most/all of one's business logic into its own library to share it between React and React Native.
If you use React Native, you're in for a treat if you're used to fully native cross-platform dev. It really does a great job of rounding off the many, many rough corners on Android that make it such a pain-in-the-ass to work with. Warning: the ecosystem's kinda nutty and does a bad job of keeping in sync, so avoid dependencies that directly target React Native as much as possible if you want to ever be able to, say, upgrade your React Native version without breaking everything. Pure JS libs that have no truck with React Native, good. Libs that add narrowly-scoped extra native integration for RN, usually good. Mostly JS libs that add on to React Native itself, typically just a disaster waiting to happen, no matter how nice they seem at first.
Oh, and use Typescript. For the love of god use Typescript. Just start the project with it, and never look back.
ashark commented on William James and the philosophy of pragmatism neh.gov/humanities/2018/w... · Posted by u/benbreen
You sure this is the same guy? It's available on Project Gutenberg [0] but the attribution is a "Henry" James ...
Yeah, Henry James is the novelist. William's brother. I'd call his output... mixed, but much of it's really good. Big fan of Washington Square, myself. Probably better to approach shorter novella-ish works like that, and his actual short stories (there are lots) first, and work your way up to the novels (there are also lots of those). Do not start with Daisy Miller. It's among his most famous and widely-read, but just don't.
ashark commented on Bitcoin has little shot at ever being a major global currency cnbc.com/2018/01/10/bitco... · Posted by u/lxm
> If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with millions of people. But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other?
Thank you. The whole system is people running in empty circles. Most people are not doing anything useful or out of value for regular folks (housing, utilities and transportation). Even worse, we are consuming lots of resources and human time and yet (many countries) still can't solve the basic problems: decent food, affordable and acceptable housing, functioning transportation.
I'm in a city block where there is lots of "call centers". Their target is stupid, old, or ill people from the developed world. They make money "legally" from getting these people to call them on expensive lines. It's a multi-million euros business. It's fueling the whole block (real estate, food joints, coffee shops, accountants, retailers, etc...) Many of these are relying on these call centers.
The whole block is a scam. Albeit a legal one. And albeit some guys (like a food joint) has nothing to do with it.
The whole economy is something like that. Universities, hospitals, consulting, advertising, and the big one "Government" and its army of bureaucracy buildings and stuff.
The whole system is bankrupt. Bitcoin is an open system that is showing the true color of humans and greed. We are fueling crypto because that is what we are. We are just getting more efficient at it thanks to technology.
"I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is that they are supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone."
- Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, 1961
I don't wanna go dig through my copy to find it right now, but there's also a pretty long bit where he describes how most of the "work" that most of the "workers" at his (the character, Frank Wheeler's) firm do is making brief comments on various proposals or memos or whatever then sending them off to other people for their comments, trying to avoid being caught with the hot potato and actually having to do whatever's being proposed. They're all very good at it.
Again, written in 1961.
ashark commented on A Gym Chain Is Banning Cable News nytimes.com/2018/01/10/bu... · Posted by u/artur_makly
Judging by how well-informed he was later in life, I think he reversed his opinion on the subject a lot later on.
It doesn't take a ton of time to be way better-informed than most people on current events. Background reading of big ol' books is a lot more valuable than keeping up with the headlines every day. You can catch up on the need-to-know current events with one monthly paper you scan on a lazy Sunday morning, and maybe a weekly or monthly newsletter or two. Reading about the stuff daily is 100% not necessary.
Similarly, and especially given our two-party system in the US, following every twist and turn in a political race is pure entertainment, of exactly no more value to you or anyone else than watching soap operas. You can make an as-informed-as-it-needs-to-be decision by spending that time on building up foundational knowledge instead, then catching up on the happenings of the race and the candidates' positions an hour before you go vote.
ashark commented on North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map nytimes.com/2018/01/09/us... · Posted by u/kyleblarson
> Has it always been that way
Well, let's analyze each of your questions in turn.
> Since I came to the US there is this constant push for impeaching the sitting president
When did you come to the USA?
There was a constant push to impeach Obama. There was a constant push to impeach Bush. The was a constant push to impeach Clinton.
Clinton was elected in 1993, so there are a lot of adult Americans who were born in the USA and who can also say that "since I came to the US (aka was born), there has been this constant push for impeaching the sitting president".
> extreme gerrymandering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Etymology
> and all the other nonsense
Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's. But there have been worse eras, too. At least the congressmen who've been shot lately weren't shot by other congressmen in duels, for example... :-\
> Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's.
Electoral punishment for gaming the system to extreme levels, and even for misconduct that has no benefit for a party or candidates image or efficacy (blatant corruption, Roy Moore-type behavior [edit, 1]) has proven to be non-existent. The more various candidates and officials push, the farther it's clear they can go without punishment. Things are getting worse because they keep trying to push farther, and succeeding.
This is largely because of wedge issues—especially abortion, but also guns to a lesser extent. The problem won't go away unless we modify our election system to permit more than two viable parties at a time, so that, say, an anti-abortion party can go way off the rails and its saner voters can defect to another anti-abortion party, without losing anti-abortion voting power in legislative bodies (as, say, a protest vote would), and so on for every other issue. Proportional representation or something along those lines would help a lot. Most any effective change like this would also eliminate or greatly reduce the power of gerrymandering.
[1] Nearly non-existent—he did lose, after all, but narrowly.