I feel like websites like https://www.tindie.com could definitely fill that gap. It's like an Etsy + Hackaday where people sell different levels of hardware etc.
I’m like you and I’ve slowly started to embrace it. Sometimes that means three laundry baskets. One for clean one for dirty and one for wear again. And then iterating on top of that!
I did the third laundry basket for a bit. I think it's missing what's peak about the chair which is that I can still sorta see what's in the pile. I'm trying to find a coat hook esque system.
When I saw Simone Giertz's build, I immediately wished she'd start selling those.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H175G8NH2Cg - "A chair built for your half-dirty clothes". I'd love this to be my "3rd basket".
wont everything be wrinkled when you take it back out of wear-again basket?!
i just tend to order most things on hangers with the most newly washed things to the right, then every time i wear something and put it back it goes a bit closer to the left. then when im putting on a wash i know that its all the things on the very left that need to be washed.
another useful way to keep track of things is to hang up anything thats newly washed with the hook of the hanger facing towards you, then hang it up the normal way once you worn it. and i still order the newly washed things from right to left as well since theres the odd thing i dont wear that often which can go musty if its just sitting there for months, so when im putting on a wash sometimes i check the very left side of the newly washed things as well
> wont everything be wrinkled when you take it back out of wear-again basket?!
Yup. But when it’s t-shirt and shorts, or t-shirt and jeans, I don’t care. I don’t really have any other clothes. I have a jumper somewhere and a cycling top.
I just shared this with folks, it looks incredible! I’m giving it a try myself too.
By the way, I was trying to use a bunch of one-liner SQL statements to explore the data, and it seems like the editor doesn’t handle comments very well. Is there a way to make it work better?
It's to gaslight you into thinking the nineteenth shitty enterprise SaaS for ultra-niche market is going to make you a billionaire. In reality, you're just cheap labor for lining the pockets of the VCs who will sell off their shares to the next sucker at the first chance they get.
There's the idealized America that we learn about in school, then there's America as it is.
I guess ideals are a nice tool to compare something against to measure something's relative value. But they can also be used as a whitewash. Maybe the difference is how engaged an informed citizen body is with the government.
Ideal or not, it's propaganda. We're lead to believe only other countries use propaganda to control their citizens, shield them from truths, and paint foreign countries as "lesser than" or, worse "the enemy". All the while, we're doing the same thing. Maybe I've had the wool pulled over my eyes my first 4 1/2 decades, but it seems pretty clear now.
They don’t pay teachers enough to challenge the norm and deal with the fallout. Whether that’s by design or not… probably? The idea here being to incentivize teachers to do the bare minimum.
Exactly government controlled and mandated education = you will be "appropriately" indoctrinated with framing assumptions while being educated. State schooling = statist schooling.
> There's the idealized America that we learn about in school, then there's America as it is.
I strongly dislike this take.
There is the idealized America that we wish America was, and there is an entire continuum from that point all the way to "no functioning state at all Mad Max hellhole". Treating all points that are not exactly at "idealized America" as equivalent discards a massive amount of nuance and effectively makes it impossible to advocate for incremental change.
Yes, America is not perfect. But that doesn't mean that the America we had before Trump's massive corruption is identical to the American we have today.
To be fair, taking bribes for your presidential library has been apart of American politics for a while. Also, sorry, I forgot we don't call it "bribing" anymore, it's called "lobbying" now ;)
This is exactly the track we're on, if you hadn't noticed the last week. The train has left the station. We likely are arriving a lot sooner than you may think.
For the past 40 years one party in particular has lectured me about how they are the ones who instill the values of this idealized America you mention, how they are the ones who are the real patriots, and how they only can interpret what the founding fathers intended.
We are discovering that enough of the electorate does not care when some politicians do it, so that the ideal is unenforceable, and I think it’s because of the media.
after Nixon various people came together to form media organizations explicitly to prevent holding people like Nixon accountable, today is a result of that and our failure to hold Nixon (and before him the leaders of the south in the civil war) accountable
You have to have people willing to enforce the laws we have. We don't have that these days, incredibly few people in government over the past 4 years have been willing to try to push back against his racket.
Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 billion on third parties. And although that sounds like a lot of money to you or me, on the national scale, it’s puny. The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year.
This conflated two things as equivalent, and they are not equivalent.
Buying almonds is a market exchange with good transparency around what you’re getting and how much it’s going to cost.
Elections are not open market exchange. For starts, you aren’t buying a good. Another is that this discounts a lot of other election adjacent activities like all the party volunteers who are unpaid, for example. Those don’t count toward spend but if it did I imagine the totals would get much higher.
Not to mention, we are talking about someone getting elected who very well does have influence over citizenry. Buying almonds is just buying almonds. Getting elected is a transference of power.
Honestly elections are surprisingly cheap for what is gotten in return, but they couldn’t be more different
I'd say that by spending money on elections, both as donations and as taxes, we do buy a good: good governance (preferably) and peaceful transfer of power.
The problem is that the market is not efficient: only 2-3 offers, mostly from the same two brands, each brand with its own known serious problems. The process is actually an auction of sorts (first past the post), and returns are not accepted!
USA should eliminate first-past-the-post voting, and replace it with something like ranked choice voting. Allows for more brands in the election, as people can preference minor parties and not 'throw away their vote' if they didnt get enough votes in total.
2018 wasn't a presidential race, which consistently have higher spending. 2020 and 2024 were each over $15B, and there is a steady upward trend in real dollars.
The current supreme court also has a tendency to strike down campaign finance regulations. Everyone knows citizens United, but more recently e.g. AFP v Bonta (2021) struck down reporting requirements in California, which paves the way for unlimited anonymous spending, and Snyder (2022), which reclassifies anything except the most obvious bribes as "gratuities". We'll probably have more 5-4 or 6-3 decisions in the next four years that increase money in politics.
Not sure how is paying for food relevant to paying for politician. In many countries there is absolute cap per campaign to make it fair. Making it 'fair' is maybe not that relevant in two party system but still that amount of money from single entity is corruption.
Yup, it distorts what a politician will say and what bills they'll sponsor if they're elected. The most dangerous thing the $12 billion in almond money will do is buy a politician to allow them to skirt worker protections and environmental protections to continue maximizing almond money. That puts the interests of the politician not with the general population who wants clean water and safe non-abusive jobs but rather the few almond farm owners who want to maximize almond production while minimizing worker costs (and perhaps locking out new almond farmers from the industry).
This sort of kleptocracy is the problem with American politics. Bribery laws are so laughably bad that you have to literally stuff gold bars in your suit pockets before you run the risk of being prosecuted. You have to be a grade A moron to get caught.
Speaking of grade A morons. Our political establishment here in Ohio jumped into bed with a huge publicly traded energy company who was pushing millions of dollars each to various individuals. I'm still boggled that these people thought they could bag millions of dollars and no one would notice.
It used to be that when payoffs to politicians were discovered it would be paltry amounts like $10-30k that no one would notice and which are easily ingested into someone's finances without ringing any bells with the IRS or regulators. You would ask yourself why they would risk their career for such a small amount of money.
These politicians and appointed regulators in Ohio were trying to literally absorbed generational wealth without regulators or the IRS noticing. Impossible.
Our governor DeWine, who was definitely knowledgeable of all this and involved, was smart enough to keep his hands off the money--though they did fund his campaigns legally. He stands to serve out his final term and be replaced by one of the others in the cabal. (Yost), or Viveck Ramaswammy. The times.
It is not allowed. People are conflating a private lawsuit between Donald Trump and some large corps, with the Justice Dept suing large corps. Justice Dept can't settle and give money the money away. Let's not let politics lobotomize our common sense.
But every successful SV founder and or VC is not only a tech genius but also a geopolitical and socioeconomic expert! That’s why they make war companies, cozy up to politicians, and talk about how woke is ruining the world. /s
In fairness, 'geopolitical experts' may not really exist. There are a range of people who make up interesting stories to a greater or lesser extent but all seem to be serially misinformed. Some things are too complicated to have expertise in.
Indeed, while the existence of socioeconomic experts seems more likely we don't have any way of reliably identifying them. The people who actually end up making social or economic policy seem to be winging it by picking the policy that most benefits wealthy people and/or established asset owners. It is barely possible to blink twice without stumbling over a policy disaster.
>In fairness, 'geopolitical experts' may not really exist.
Except for, I don't know, the many thousands of people who work at various government agencies (diplomatic, intelligence) or even private sector policy circles whose job it is to literally be geopolitical experts in a given area.
There are thousands of gamblers whose job is to literally predict the tumbling random number generators in the slot machines they play, and will be rewarded with thousands of dollars if they do a good job.
They are not experts. As said above, some things are too complicated to have expertise in.
It's plausible that geopolitics may work the same way, with the ones who get lucky mistaken for actual experts.
Absolute rubbish. There's lots of factual information here you can know and use to make informed "guesses" (if you will).
People like Musk, who are often absolutely clueless about countries' political situations, their people, their makeup, their relationships and agreements with neighboring countries, as well as their history and geography, are obviously going to be terrible at predicting outcomes compared to someone who actually has deep knowledge of these things.
Also we seem to be using the term "geopolitics" a bit loosely in this thread. Maybe we could inform ourselves what the term we are using even means before we discount that anyone could have expertise in it[1]. I don't think people here meant to narrow it down to just that. What we really seem to concern ourselves with here is international relations theory and political sciences in general.
Now whether most politicians should also be considered experts in these areas is another matter. From my personal experience, I'd say most are not. People generally don't elect politicians for being experts - they elect politicians for representing their uninformed opinions. There seems to be only a weak overlap between being competent at the actual job and the ability to be elected into it.
> There's lots of factual information here you can know and use to make informed "guesses" (if you will).
The gambler who learned the entire observable history of a tumbling RNG will not be in a better position to take the jackpot than the gambler who models it as a simple distribution. You cannot become an expert on certain things.
Geopolitics may or may not be one of these things, but you've made no substantial argument either way.
Geopolitics is a complex system. Having lots of factual and historical information to inform your decision is not obviously an advantage over a guess based on a cursory read of the situation.
It is like economists - they have 0 predictive power vs. some random bit player with a taste for stats when operating at the level of a country's economy. They're doing well if they can even explain what actually happened. They tend to get the details right but the big picture is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Geopolitics is much harder to work with than economics, because it covers economics plus distance and cultural barriers even before the problem of leaders doing damn silly things for silly reasons. And unlike economics there is barely the most tenuous of anchors to check if the geopolitical "experts" get things right even with hindsight. I'd bet the people who sent the US into Afghanistan and Iraq are still patting themselves on the back for a job well done despite what I think most people could accept as the total failure of those particular expeditions.
I thought Peter Zeihan was a geopolitical expert until he started talking about things I lived through, with complete ignorance of the basics. It's not that his take was wrong, it's that his basic underlying assumptions were all wildly different from reality on the ground.
Any sort of geopolitical expert is generally going to be labeled as such because he works in the domain at a reasonably high level.
The problem with that is that when at such a level, political factors start to come into play.
The net effect is that in any conflict, the winning side will have competent and qualified expert geopolitical analyses, while the losing side will have propagandists.
So the geopolitical expert is, at best, a liminal species.
That's so wrong in so many levels, also cynical. If the world worked by what you described, we would have been already obliterated ourselves a long time ago, or mass-enslavery would have happened. It didn't.
Geopolitics can be studied and learned, and is something that diplomats heavily rely upon.
Of course, those geopolitical strategies can play in certain ways we don't foresee, as on the other side we also have an actor that is free to do what they want.
But for instance, if you give Mexico a very good trade agreement as a strong country like the US, it's very likely that they will work with you on your special requests.
They may exist, but the real expertise is mostly kept non-public. Regarding the Ukraine war, both pro-Russian and pro-American public pundits never mentioned economic and real strategic issues apart from NATO membership for almost 2.5 years.
Then Lindsey Graham outright mentioned the mineral wealth and it became a topic, though not a prominent one.
Access to the Caspian Sea via the Volga-Don canal and the Sea of Azov is never mentioned. Even though there are age old Rand corporation papers that demand more US influence in that region.
The best public pundits get personalities and some of the political history correct (and are entertaining), but it is always a game of omission on both sides.
So, you think the system is genuinely trying to identify expertise to achieve equitable outcomes, and just happening to fail at it? Rather than policy being shaped by personal networks and existing power structures that tend to benefit themselves?
I think the system has been carefully configured to benefit wealthy people and/or established asset owners. But the reason that there is no effective resistance to that is because identifying generalist socioeconomic experts is practically impossible.
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