Retired civil engineer and GIS programmer.
http://brander.ca - which has all my contact info.
My favourite "writer dodge" about Star Trek is that almost nobody, not in sixty @#$$#@ing years, ever asked them what life was like back home. How DOES work and school and all that work in the Federation?
One economist, Manu Saadia, wrote a book, "Trekonomics" about the what an economy would be like with no money, every object replicated. He asked.
They said they had no idea. It was, ummm...the kind of culture that would send out those starships! There, buddy - done.
The valuable read is the preface to "The Reactionary Mind" by Cory Robin.
Prof. Robin had intended to write a book called "The Conservative Mind" but gave up when he couldn't find any conservatives - that is, analysts who felt that Right Now was "peak civilization" or whatever, and wanted to conserve the Now.
Every single "conservative" he interviewed or analysed, wanted to go backwards to an earlier time - felt things had been going wrong for decades.
Cute, but the way to really dramatize how gentle a slope Olympus has is to note that a person climbing it could not see the top, since it is over the horizon the whole way up.
@lawyersgunsnmoney @briankrebs
Ah, kids these days, who think this is new.
From "Fools for Scandal", the way the NYT harped and harped and harped upon Whitewater, which turned out to be a nothing, to the way they piled on Al Gore, the way they took all of Bush's claims against Iraq seriously. (How could they miss the Al Qaeda was Saddam's bitter enemy that wanted to depose him? He was going to give THEM a nuclear bomb??)
It's a permanent fixture of their reporting.
I think if you grade lies by the number of people they got killed, Cheney's are much more scandalous.
By multiple orders of magnitude.
He is sympathetically depicted as a young man, making his way in Paris as a waiter, when he tries to get the French to back out of Vietnam at the Versailles Conference in 1919, as part of the "Young Indiana Jones Adventures", back in the nineties.
About the 3rd year of university, I realized that people who went to all the lectures, and the tutorials, did the assigned exercises and took notes and studied the night before exams...
...were all getting B and B+ marks.
Those who actually take the subjects seriously will still learn, will have superpowers compared to their slackers.
If 1% remain real students, that's enough for innovation and progress. 1% is all we ever had, anyway.
Americans always had trouble telling these two apart. Or at least, were sure the second would become the first if he were given one iota of power.
I wrote "zoning" twice, "board" after it, so I can't see where "Council" came from.
When zoning laws reach the level of a Council meeting, the young show up:
Specifically, they stop being shaped by the retired residents that have endless time for zoning meetings.
It's not like the communities have little community-representative elections, or local-community referenda where everybody in the community gets a say. That would be "urban democracy".
Communities are represented by those who show up for multi-hour zoning board meetings.
It's the same with Windows as with Republican presidents: Every new one makes the old one look good by comparison.
A massive air war, I guess. But join me in typing "Kashmir" into google maps and turning on the transportation layer.
It's one of those things authors used to call a "deep mountain fastness" before it got cliche'.
There's about two roads in from each side. Bomb them, no tanks. (Actually, I'm not sure tanks could make it with the roads in usual repair).
The big problem with Kashmir is pride. It's not actually worth fighting over, economically.
Or he could weasel on about "freedom" and "conscience" and "opposing tyranny" and avoid adversarial questions.
He's been doing this politics stuff a long time, and is sitting up at night gaming out the scenarios, and polishing the snap answers.
Two great examples of how diverse needs could be. I don't think I ever used MATCH(), and avoided the various "lookup" functions because I was doing all that on the database side before sucking in (the results of) a metre-long SQL statement.
But - if you have ONE problem with one of 1000 features, the whole thing loses your confidence.
People would do a workaround in Excel, because the employer gave them no choice but to live with it.
Calc always had to be perfect..
Also the db connections.
Excel has the somewhat-wearisome DAO and ADO (that always annoyed, which was which) and ODBC, which they tried to replace with, umm - OLE3 ?
Thing was, the "problem" was they had so MANY database connection products.
Calc, not so much. Excel, I could link a table to an SQL query and make a refresh button with 2 lines of code behind it for those who couldn't right-click and pick refresh. Calc, nope.
For my application, that's all that mattered. Like asking me what was bad about a car, other than no headlights, when I had to drive at night.
Calc is all I have on this machine, actually, finally went Linux on laptop. I should look at the most-recent version.
The comment's from years ago, and I see this version actually has "pivot tables" on the Data menu, which is a great start.
Same - if you can program VBA, you can switch to Libre, if not in detail as to every function name, or anything.
I didn't get that far with it because of the spreadsheet itself, alas. I did a lot of pivot tables and database hits with Excel, and Calc just wasn't even tolerably good. I literally keep a Windows machine around (and a dual-boot) just for Excel.
Which is painful.
It's like graphic artists that hate Adobe and Apple, etc - but cain't quit them...
Thing is, economists have a numerical answer.
"I will drop all my activism when the income distribution has an OECD GINI number of 25 or lower".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_inequality
I've known Theo for 30 years; first when I got the Calgary Unix Users Group to give him a lecture slot, in the 90s when we mostly charged Sun/HP/IBM/DEC/etc about $1000 to address a crowd of workstation buyers with a 'lecture' about their latest and greatest.
He and his motley crew of volunteers have run a few of their Hackathons in Calgary over the years.
They've stayed solid and reliable the whole time. Not many for-profit companies can say that.
You'll have an easy time defending my term, the "Anti-Vaxxer Convoy".
Yes, there were interviewees who said "It's not the vaccines, I'm vaxxed myself."
None of the ones where the journalist went on to ask if they got vaxxed because they believe them to be needed by a real disease, effective protection, and very safe.
All who were questioned said they did NOT promote vaccines to other Convoy members, had only been vaxxed because they had to and were angry about that.