> Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers.
This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.
Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.
I don’t believe so, but the judge sentenced him so harshly because the amount involved was astronomical, exceeding the maximum amount specified by federal sentencing guidelines for fraud ($400 million at the time)[0]. Also, many people lost their life savings and the fraud lasted for nearly 30 years and the judge didn’t feel that Madoff did everything he could to mitigate the harm caused by his actions.
My spouse bought me a Chemex coffee brewer years ago. It makes significantly better coffee than a standard drip brewer and I use it pretty much every morning. It’s not as easy as pushing a button or using a K-cup, but there’s something slightly meditative about the process.
My mom gave me a manual pourover, not an all glass chemex but similar, which is one of very very few simple functional objects I'm happy to have. I use it every morning.
I’m also not in that age group (I’m late 30s) but I’ve been watching TV and movies with closed captioning enabled since I was a kid and have found that it helps my comprehension of what’s going on with plot lines, etc, immensely. Maybe I’m just a stronger reader than listener, but I’m at the point where I vastly prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater because I can have CC on by default.
I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.
It’s not totally an archive per se but I discovered this site for electronic music when it was originally a Flash application: https://music.ishkur.com/
The Walmart near us has a set of EV chargers in its parking lot that offer free charging for up to 2 hours. I bought my first EV earlier this year and I’ve definitely visited that Walmart more than I ever would before because it’s convenient to get a quick charge in and grab a few groceries, etc, I might need anyway.
We recently started letting our 9 year-old walk down to a nearby park alone to meet and play with friends. It’s helping them build independence and confidence and I have no concerns about kidnapping, etc, because it’s only a couple of blocks away and we live in a safe neighborhood (they also have a phone they take with them and know to call/text us when they change their plans and go to another nearby park).
What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police or child protective services.
That last part is WAY more common and likely than anything else.
> Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017.
> According to the NWS Storm Data, over the last 30 years (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year.
So letting kids walk to the park is way less risky than a thunderstorm (though perhaps they shouldn't walk to the park IN a thunderstorm).
> In 2019, 608 child passengers age 12 and younger died in motor vehicle crashes, and more than 91,000 were injured. Of the children 12 and younger who died in a crash (for whom restraint use was known), 38% were not buckled up.
I haven't done the numbers, but driving a kid to the park when not buckled up may be more dangerous than letting them walk.
It's only the end of the free range era among the whites. Other populations in my city have no issues letting their children range around. It's common to be on the bus and hear school aged children talking in various languages around me on the bus.
Annual under 21 abductions by strangers are 8 times more likely than death by lightning strike for all groups.
But there’s lots of confounding variables there. A kid that’s not outside won’t be abducted by a stranger and you won’t be struck by lightning if you’re inside as well. Thunderstorms don’t happen everyday but a kid may walk alone twice a day. So what’s the right equivalence? Is walking alone through a bad neighborhood the same as going into the lightning storm and grabbing a flag pole?
Along these lines I am curious about the number of innocent families affected by the harassment of overzealous adults (my son has had this happen twice) or CPS (zero, fortunately). Given the somewhat subjective nature of "innocent" it's probably not quantifiable, but I sometimes wonder what the risk actually is. Being struck by lightning is unlikely, but the potential effects are serious enough to warrant taking precautions— I wonder how similar the analogy truly is.
>>>What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police or child protective services.
Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. I'm not worried about my 6-year-old walking around the neighbourhood alone, or staying in the car (in proper weather) while I do an errand, or going into a store and grabbing something. I'm not worried about kidnapping and murder and all that stuff, since it's so vanishingly rare that it's worth worrying about as much as lightning.
What I am worried about is some busybody calling CPS because they think kids are stolen and sold if they're left unsupervised for 5 minutes.
I’ve been remote at least some of the time for the last 4-5 years and fully remote since the start of the pandemic (which is what I intend to do going forward).
I totally understand why some people would rather be in an office, even those who are “just” writing code. But I’m just not a very social person and I value time with my family over in-person social interactions with my coworkers (despite my current coworkers being very nice and awesome people).
There’s also just zero need for me to be physically colocated given the work that I do, so any benefits are greatly outweighed by the commute and lack of flexibility that comes with a requirement to be in an office everyday.
I would add that it’s not only expensive financially but also in terms of time.
I grew up very poor and was fairly poor as an adult until about 6-7 years ago. I constantly had to make time trade offs. Do I exercise or evaluate and cut coupons to make my meager grocery budget last longer? Do I meal plan to make my money stretch further or spend that time investing in a skill? Not to mention things like not having reliable transportation, which meant taking the bus to and from work which tends to be a 2-3x longer commute. And if the bus was ever late, minimum wage retail jobs don’t really care so you get a “mark” on your record and potentially written up/fired if it happens too many times.
I consider myself very fortunate that I was lucky enough to find myself a tech job and pull myself out of my previous financial situation. But I get the sense that a lot of people here haven’t been through that so they underestimate just how much more difficult it is to be poor, at least in the US.
I’ve had to juggle that in periods of my life too, on the polar opposite side I love how fast things can be.
Buying a car with a cashier’s check after negotiating lower means no financing charges, interest, credit pulls and just having stored value for a little while. So much cheaper both financially and in time.
Right now my used car is worth more than when I bought it.
This is one line, posted out of context, from a very large codebase. I don't agree that you can learn much about the culture at Twitch from this snippet.
This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.
Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.