> Quickly after the park was established, Whittlesly describes white superintendents trying to make the area “safe” by removing “primitive savages” from the park, claiming they didn’t live there to begin with as they were afraid of the geysers. Those claims were completely untrue; in fact, the Yosemite Indians — as well as Sheep-eaters and Mountain Shoshone tribes — lived on and revered the land, and many others also considered the geysers to be sacred. Tribes such as the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Flatheads and the Kiowa would travel through the land as well at other points of the year, for hunting or in search of obsidian for arrowheads.
> Making the land safe wasn’t the least of the problems for the Native American tribes. In a “park” now protected and preserved from “the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit,” how were the tribes to eat, sleep, hunt, gather food, light fires? They weren’t. Forced off the land now considered a natural preserve by the government, Indians were once again removed from their ancestral home.
So sure, we could say national parks are "absolutely american"..
If you want to see something closer to "absolutely democratic", look e.g. at British Columbia, where all provincial parks are free to enter. They still have a permit system and fees, but only for overnight camping; if you just want to come and walk and enjoy the surroundings during the day, it costs nothing.
Curiously, the provincial govt tried to introduce an access fee a few years ago, and there was a huge pushback from the citizenry.
The elimination of day use or parking fees in BC parks coincided with a significant reduction of their budgets - after all, much of their money was from those user fees - and since then trails and infrastructure have been left to crumble. And that's to say nothing of the lack of resources for staff - in 2016 there were just seven park rangers in the entire province[1]. You can see more than seven rangers in one room if you walk into a Yosemite or Yellowstone visitor centre. That's not democracy - it's just neglect.
For an interesting contrast to this sentiment, read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. He is writing from a somewhat unique perspective from his position as a park ranger in Arches, way back in the 1930s when it was still mostly undeveloped.
An incredible read and an interesting view of things at the time.
I've been traveling to parts of Death Valley (which were former BLM land) for over two decades and know people who have been going to the same areas for four or five decades. The Park Service is not "the best of the US". Instead, at the local level, it is people with an agenda attempting to make a mark/name for themselves. One particular former BLM area has palm trees which the park service wants to remove. Yet, the park itself has more of the same around where they expect tourists to spend money. Hypocracy.
The same National Park System, PG&E and it's subcontractors are surveying and noting places where trees need trimming -- in particular around the park beetle. Said contractors and PG&E itself pointed out to NPS the vast groves of dead pines in the park itself and offered to help thin things. NPS declined due to "wanting to preserve the beauty" of which is large swaths of dead trees.
Edward Abbey was right in being suspicious of how humans would preserve and maintain our parks.
Yellowstone was indeed the first "national park" at least within its cultural sphere. Before that, European royalty would often protect certain areas as their hunting ground or sum-such, but those were far smaller.
The idea of these protected areas serving the public good by, among other things, remaining accessible to the general public, is also integral to the definition of the term (and this article and new policy show this rather well). Such a policy may not have occurred to anyone establishing a nature reserve in Europe at the time, where classes would remain a fundamental category of society until the end of WW2.
Mostly because by the time conservation of wilderness came into vogue, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the only Western-style democracies with large, intact tracts of wilderness remaining.
This comment confuses me. Are you saying that Europe... destroyed all their mountains? Or what?
There are a lot of people that live in Europe, it's not that there was so much wilderness and now it's all paved over. Australia and Canada have huge areas of wilderness because it's partially uninhabitable. Not many places have that.
Wilderness is not just the mountains. It is the complete ecosystem, the most productive part of which is not rock and ice (which remained largely untouched in Europe as in North America because as you note there's not anything you can really build there) but the meadows, valleys and forests most of which are indeed paved over in Europe. How many primitive (i.e. never cut and regrown) forests exist in western Europe? How many subalpine valleys in the Alps have no village or pastures in them?
Don't get me wrong, there are many beautiful places in Europe. I've had the pleasure of doing several long distance walks in the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Corsica. But it's not wilderness.
Even uninhabitable places need protection from resource extraction if they are to remain wilderness. This is how Canada lost most of its coastal rainforest. Not because there are cities there now, but because it was all cut down and sold to make shingles and 2x4s.
It’s a poetic statement not a literal one. It speaks to the aspirational idea of what America could and should be/aspire to be.( in the mind of the writer)
If you are interested in an IBM Model M I recommend the Unicomp UB4044A (http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/UB4044A). It's a IBM Model M with USB. I bought one over a decade ago (build date 4/20/2007).
> I bought one over a decade ago (build date 4/20/2007).
Awhile ago I remember hearing that they were having some financial problems because essentially they never had repeat customers: buy one keyboard and you'll never need another.
They need to make a new Spacesaver model (one without the numpad) and not only will they have a lot of new customers, they will also have each one of their old customers come back to buy one.
> They need to make a new Spacesaver model (one without the numpad)
Yeah. I'm in the market for a new keyboard and am thinking about a TKL. Just spent some time on the Unicomp site looking for a TLK version to no avail.
And if they don't want to rejigger to do backlit keys, they could add a USB hub with three ports: one for a mouse, one for a USB stick or such, and one for a USB-powered LED lamp.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Hal Lasko (The Pixel Painter). Hal started using Microsoft Paint when he got a computer on his 85th birthday until his death at 99 in 2014. He made some great looking art bit by bit.
Ooo I'm so happy that you mentioned this! I own two Hal Lasko's :) That story is amazing. It really shows the value that tech can add to anyone's life.
This reminded me of a passage on pilot checklists from The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande:
> Commercial pilots have been using checklists for decades. Gawande traces this back to a fly-off at Wright Field, Ohio, in 1935, when the Army Air Force was choosing its new bomber. Boeing's entry, the B-17, would later be built by the thousands, but on that first flight it took off, stalled, crashed and burned. The new airplane was complicated, and the pilot, who was highly experienced, had forgotten a routine step.
>
> From http://old.seattletimes.com/html/books/2010737113_br08checkl...
I can’t help but think having such autonomy is tied to profitability. I’m sure there are plenty of examples where an employee at a profitable company doesn’t have autonomy. But how many have autonomy where there's not profitability?
I think you're close to the mark, but it's less about profitability specifically, and more about growth. A company that is focused on growing as fast as possible, dominating a market, and generating a favourable outcome for investors is only going to get there through big audacious bets in terms of product strategy. If you need to get 3x as large as you are a year from now, no amount of small tweaks for better user experience from individual developers is going to get you there. Instead, you'll find large numbers of developers (or maybe even the entire team at smaller shops) all working towards big, flashy advancements.
There's a relationship here with profitability, for sure - companies that are profitable are likely not prioritizing growth over profit, and aren't beholden to investors who want a big exit, but the profitability is more of an indicator than the cause.
Think about a financial trader (stock, commodities, etc) that place big, but risky, bets on their own initiative. The times we know about this sort of thing happening have all been disastrous to the companies they work at. Of course, what we hear about in this regard selects out all but the disasters (nature of news reporting)... and as far as I know were almost certainly not the de facto sanctioned actions of a bottom-up culture. But these cases of autonomy were anything but profitable.
This applies to any job: work where what you do is the core discipline. At a law firm, be a lawyer. At a medical practice, be a doctor. As a software engineer, work at a company where software is the product. Don’t write software at an insurance company and expect job satisfaction. At such companies software engineers are seen as replaceable.
Another option: work where what you do is largely represented by upper management. They make the decisions and if they worked in your discipline they will empathize with you, defend you, and promote you.
I up-voted you because there is a lot of truth to what you wrote. But you also have to realize that today many businesses that don't understand how to develop software but still need to have effective software development processes.
That's a huge personal opportunity if you are an effective communicator who can emphasize with managers from disparate backgrounds. They need someone who not only can implement and manage a successful software development process, but communicate to them what is possible, what is risky, and what the best trade-offs there are to develop software to meet the company's goals.
Define fun. If rewarded, taking a team with shitty development processes, poor software, etc and taking it to the next level can be a great fun. But only if it is reward, i.e. is considered valuable.
Actually, I quite like writing software in companies where software isn't the core discipline. But I'm writing it in support of the core discipline. Admittedly I consult/freelance now, but writing software to support FMCGs, Loss Adjusters, Hospitality, Airlines, etc.... it's all cool stuff and really enjoyable.
> As a software engineer, work at a company where software is the product. Don’t write software at an insurance company and expect job satisfaction. At such companies software engineers are seen as replaceable.
Speak for yourself. My non-tech employer (small manufacturer) treats me very well and despite being anything but an exceptional developer my experience is that developers are closer to being regarded as magicians in these environments.
That's of course a very anecdotal impression, but so is yours.
I would imagine that small businesses where most of the employees have the opportunity to interact with the owner(s) is quite different than a large company where a dev's salary is a line-item under liabilities.
Typically with a smaller & medium-sized businesses (<200 employees), the owner is generally and acutely aware of each individuals impact to the company and would hopefully treat and compensate people commensurate to their value and impact.
There's still a lot of people who view tech folks as wizards of black magic. All they know in their tenure in the business is that some process used to take 5 people 3 work-days to build a widget, while now, the software by the dev + some new fangled machine allows 1 person to build the widget in half a day.
When I did consulting work for a small print-shop during my college days, they were always very appreciative of the work I did and had no problem paying for my work.
> In New York City’s subway system, for instance, the travelers who gain entrance by swiping their MetroCards over 5 million times each weekday do so with the assistance of IBM’s theoretically defunct software.
