He passed away ten years ago, the glasses were custom-made in 70's or so. He'd close one eye and use the other (better suited for this). He'd have tremors, including in the eyes. Reading made him very tired, eventually a friend would read complex beta literature before him. To me (as kid) the glasses felt like a huge looking glass.
A friend of my parents also made a custom card deck, with huge symbols and letters. That way, we could work around his disability. We always had to work around his disability, and it regressed but slow variant and he was also too old to get the medicine which effectively stopped the MS from getting worse. However, it meant other people who had the quick version or were younger got more QoL.
I don't think he ever used Calibri. I mean, at that time, he wasn't into computers anymore. He had all kind of health isssues due to MS. It pains me to think people like him now have more difficulty to read letters because of BS decisions like these just cause NIH or whatever the silly reason must be. But there's also good news: if it is digital, they can override the font and such.
Sounds like he had lots of good people around him helping him.
The technical aspects you mention are important. I have diplopia, and also close one eye. It gets worse in the evenings. I love paper books and own many, but all my reading now is on a Kindle, with a huge font. It makes it so much easier.
Whenever I read some of these design articles, I usually see this same glaring issue. Without any distinction, they'll present together a grab bag of objective facts, best practices, and simple conventions.
There's nothing objective about using ctrl+s for save, but it's an obvious best practice. So not following can be considered bad design fairly uncontroversially.
The two you mentioned are obviously not in that category. I take issue with the logo one especially, because I find the style of the "bad design" better and more functional.
>[...] I’m probably the only one who noticed that it’s calmer.
Most streets in the US are the same - there is an odd and even side of the road. Most are as said elsewhere also your house number is distance from the corner (most often in units of 100 feet) - I've seen half numbers before when houses when doors are close together, but normally they round.
However every development is different. The rules might be set by the city, but they change often enough that we can call this per development, others is really is the developer decides. Even where the city sets the rules, a "small fee" lets you choose your street name and address - which is why for most large companies their headquarters is "1 [company name] drive". Still the observation that in the US address are distance to corner with and even and odd size applies to the vast majority.
I'd think passive recognition of a fair few states would be a pretty low bar for relatively educated, English-speaking people. It's a pretty low bar, just placing a region with its country. People also regularly just assume that level of knowledge for globally- or culturally-relevant cities.
Maybe I think too highly of people, but I'd also imagine most would be able to get say... 6/10 right, for which countries the following list is from:
>Normally tariffs are collected by the receiving country when a package arrives.
For good reason too, the sender engaged the carrier. The receiver has no business relationship with the carrier, so they don't have an opportunity to pay any tariff to the carrier.
This is especially relevant when the carrier engages a local contractor for the last leg of a delivery, because they don't even have a presence there.
When I order things from China to the UK, on AliExpress, they arrive 'delivered duty paid' - i.e. aliexpress collects certain taxes from me at checkout, then the item doesn't get held up at the border.
So there does seem to be some mechanism for closing the buyer-seller-taxman loop. Unfortunately I have yet to find a reliable way to send things using this system.
I was gonna mention that, but I felt I was waffling on a bit, so I deleted it!
We've got the same thing with GST, basically like VAT or sales tax. So that'll appear on the invoice from AliExpress or Steam or wherever.
Businesses have a threshold before they need to charge it though. If they're under that threshold (like a small business), but the value of goods is over another threshold, then the receiver has to pay GST.
If I remember correctly, customs would mail me a letter, and I'd pay it like a tariff. Which brings me back to the main point, that's just that the carrier has nothing to do with it. It's ridiculous to get them involved in a transaction they're not a party to.
Process might be slightly different, I'm remembering from about fifteen years ago.
Using the EU and UK systems is optional, but without using it the small business's customers might be annoyed by the handling fees applied by the recipient's mail carrier, and the delay it causes.
I have seen some foreign merchants (I think DigiKey?) offer the choice, as their business customers don't need to pay VAT directly in this way, and may well prefer to do the import paperwork themselves.
I haven't seen a choice for any large retailer (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, AliExpress etc). They don't want customers annoyed by fees, or returned packages from unpaid fees and duties.
Every business that wants to send something to the UK is required to register with the British government and collect VAT on items shipped to Britain. So yes, the US could have a system like that - just get a couple DOGE kids to vibe code it tomorrow, huh.
Foreign businesses aren't required to register and collect UK VAT on items they send there, but by doing so they avoid their customers paying the £8 handling fee charged by Royal Mail.
An £8 fee makes a cheap product bought from China unappealing, so those sites do pay the fees. It's less important if the British person is buying something for €100 from a tiny French business.
I remember one UK content creator had some recipe books. I think the way to get them to EU was order from Ebay. SO big enough platform to have implemented whole thing... Not sure if that really works.
It's better if the sender includes tariffs/import duties in the price the customer pays originally, but it's easy to set up a system where the receiving country collects taxes on incoming deliveries. Ireland has it: https://www.anpost.com/Post-Parcels/Receiving/Pay-Customs-Ch...
I get an SMS saying that my parcel has arrived in the country but I have to pay customs before it's released for delivery, done via the site above.
Regarding the second one, variations of that, to help or protect strangers/travellers, seems to have been relatively common across a variety of historical cultures.
Tangentially, it also reminds me of a woman's grave that was found in Denmark I think. I can't remember how old the grave was, but something like 3-4000 years. They were able to use isotope analysis of her teeth, hair, stomach contents, etc. to trace her movements.
She was from the area, but in the last year of her life, she'd travelled down to around Switzerland and back. There was a documentary about it, I'll see if I can find it...
Well... I'm not sure which bog body it was, there were a few!
It might've been the 'Haraldskær Woman', I found an article [1] about her which roughly matches my recollections, and is from around the same time I would've seen the documentary. Although she might've only travelled as far as central Germany.
Tangential, but I am always skeptical of these sorts of reconstructed stories when they rely on purely academic methods such as ancient stomach contents analysis and inferred historical geographic flora. Like, if that’s wrong somehow, how would you know, exactly? Both of those examples are fundamentally non-verifiable.
You can check if there's agreement between different techniques. Tooth enamel would be a pretty trustworthy source of information, for example. It just depends on what level of confidence you want in the results.
I'm personally comfortable with a "probable" or "it's likely that" in my history docos. I'm a lot less comfortable with that standard when it comes to planes, trains, and automobiles.
That makes sense to me and I’m comfortable with redundant agreeing evidence as well (assuming we don’t ignore any contradictory evidence), but my impression is that these fields do not consistently have such a standard. Maybe my impression is wrong? To me it seems like you need to crawl through the dependency chain and verify that reasonable standards were used all the way up. Does the peer review process in these fields actually enforce this? It seems like no, but I am just a spectator.
I don't think you're right about that. They judged ore, as the comment above mentions, by the location it came from. They tried standard techniques to process whatever ore they had, and if those techniques led to a bad result, they considered the ore bad.
Andrew Carnegie discovered that certain "bad" ore was that way because its iron content was much higher than usual. Secure in the knowledge that this ore was actually better than "good" ore, he developed the techniques to use it.
Bifocals, I'm guessing.