Another reason that this matters (which is artificial) is that at least in the US so many car owners are on "permanent car payments".

They never pay off their cars and trade them in on another one and just keep making payments without really ever owning a car outright. And increasingly as prices have gone up they are trading cars in that they are underwater on, rolling old debt into the next loan!

If you're in this category of insane financial ignorance trying to appear rich but actually being "car poor" of course this resale is a huge problem. But for anyone who buys a car outright or pays off their loan and then drives the car for many years it's not a problem at all whether you bought new or took advantage of the massive depreciation and bought a lightly used one for a great price.

This actually sounds a lot like the US problems with energy (electrical, gas) infrastructure and also things like telephone and internet providers.

They've almost always got a state approved monopoly or duopoly and then magically the state always allows them to raise their rates.

The Fahrenheit scale is European, not American. It was created in Poland well before the United States broke off from Great Britain. We're just slow to change.

Maybe there is a reverse psychological angle to make the current US administration go metric. Fahrenheit->Polish->European->Communist/Woke. Can't have that!

> Maybe there is a reverse psychological angle to make the current US administration go metric. Fahrenheit->Polish->European->Communist/Woke. Can't have that!

1. That nonsensical, because the same logic would apply to Celsius temperatures.

2. Americans don't keep using Fahrenheit because of some aversion to Europe. Though I do have some fondness for it as resistance to the machine-people who are always going on about efficiency and trying to hurry everyone up.

People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.

Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.

We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..

I don't re-read that much "fun" material. But I totally get it, some stuff is so good it will seem like a better option to re-read it compared to trying something new. That is an elite level of book though.

I just started re-reading LOTR for maybe the 4th time in 30 years and probably first time in 10 years. Probably more for the 2nd two reasons in this authors list.

Part of my motivation was I was looking at books in the same genre I had not read and have become mostly tired of it and just kind of thought that I know LOTR is still better than 99% of them, might as well read it again. I am pleasantly surprised by how many small things I had forgotten. It also helps to wash the movies out of my brain and restore the memory of the real story.

Someone mentioned Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy. I just bought a copy of that for my son, it has probably been close to 30 years since I read that, I will be tempted to re-read it again when he is finished.

Ten years is about right in my opinion-one thing I like to do is do my best to write down “what is going to happen” and then refer to that list as I read; see what I forgot.

This says it. Actual "tech" circles were historically not super into the Mac. Of course there were some people who loved it, but the bulk of the classic Mac fanbase was design type people and people who were mostly recreational PC users but had way more money to spend than typical PC users. More hardcore tech folks were turned off by inflexibility and OS instability by the mid-90s.

This has of course changed over the past 20 years as all the OS limitations with the Mac were lifted and all PCs have kind of matured and you don't have massive increases in speed every year. So Apple's better quality, closer price parity, and better software support started to look better and better to actual tech people.

The writer seems to be one of the older crowd that made being a Mac user a huge part of their identity in the 80s and 90s. In the 80s that was tied in with the Mac being a pretty superior computer only accessible to the wealthy. In the 90s the Mac became a bit of a disaster as the decade went on and these guy stayed in utter and complete denial about it.

Then when OSX (-> Mac OS) started becoming really great in the 2000s I think they complained about stuff changing but then felt recognized when developers started flocking over to the Mac. But then you've got all these average people jumping on buying iPhones and iPads and Watches and AirPods and now they don't feel special.

It is pretty hard for me to get worked up about it. Some of the glory days were nowhere near as great as they remember, it's just they were a special club back in the day and now they're not really. The rest of us will just keep getting our jobs done using Macs.

One other aspect is a lot of these people were not particularly technical and as such were pretty inflexible in their thinking. They often seem to have built up extremely rigid and complicated ways of wanting to organize everything on their system because they are the kind of people who are used to following an exact set of steps to do everything on the computer, and they perhaps learned that at great pain. So they become extremely sensitive to UI changes as they perceive any change they have to get used to as wrecking their perfectly tuned productivity.

As an example they get super upset about the finder. They seem to have frequently built up some really complicated way of using the finder and then will get really upset, whereas an even more technical user will just go update their script/macros/whatever in 5 minutes if something changes and not get up particularly bent out of shape. The guy (and I've only ever met guys in this camp) who gets upset is probably not building a script that would have saved 100x more time over the years.

It's the left wing gaslighting everyone over all the issues caused by making it harder and harder to build anything. You blame landlords and PE when in actuality the government has stopped construction in it's tracks. This then feeds into the ultra-left agenda which tends towards socialism and "make landlords and private property illegal."

This is largely what the Abundance agenda and YIMBY is all about... getting the left to stop throwing up NIMBY road blocks.

The problems with not enough investment in new houses are not limited strictly to blue states but blue states seem to have the largest problem with it. Democrats love regulation so much that states like MA and CA have erected so many zoning and building regulations that new homes have become incredibly difficult and slow to build.

We struggle to even build apartment size condos in suburban MA that cost less than $1.1-1.5M per unit. We are rapidly heading towards new houses being $2M+ in lots of parts of the state. By the time a developer manages to buy a lot and go through all the red tape, possibly tear down an old house, go through environmental review, etc.. they can't make any money unless they build a $2M+ house. Any lot that doesn't have an old house on it in the eastern part of the state will have a long list of environmental gotchas a developer will have to fight through, possibly for years before they can even start building anything.

Housing construction is so far behind the demand that who owns the existing houses has little to do with it.

PE and Corporate landlords own more property in left leaning markets because Blue policies have made it more profitable to do so. The more new construction is slowed, the more valuable the rental properties become. Some of these companies won't want to go near red states where construction is easy. The property values and rents are just not high enough.

I worked at Cisco 1999-2001, it was my first job out of school. I worked in a group that did network management software, so we weren't touching iOS.

But it was kind of wild at that point there were still company mailing lists where these old heads would argue about iOS internals and flame each other in front of the whole company.

We still had a non-web bug tracking system while I was there. It was an interesting era! The product I worked on did have a web interface as essentially its only UI. We used Java, at some point we used MS Visual J++, and this was before JSPs existed. We used some proprietary templating engine to generate HTML.

Oh god, it wasn’t ASDM for the ASA was it? Always one Java update away from not being able to manage your firewalls

You are agreeing with abundance theory here 100%. The author of the article is one of the Abundance folks. The issues with code and permitting and environmental review take up a substantial portion of the book.