FZDC

I wonder how the built-in Google and Apple IMEs compare.

BUT I don’t tear down people for choosing that life, urban living isn’t for everyone.

My contempt for small town and rural America comes from living in it for about 5 years, and then regularly visiting it for another 3 or 4 years. I’m glad I live in a walkable city now. But I don’t really criticize people for living that rural life, except in defense to someone else attacking my own lifestyle.

When this song came out, I remembered joking with my Army friends (many of whom are from rural areas, and definitely shared the experiences of getting stationed in rural areas) that it’s weird the song! didn’t include stuff like “find decent sushi” or “attend an NFL game” or “order pizza after midnight.” Or if I’m feeling particularly mean spirited, I’d throw in “find a six figure job” or “hold hands with a white woman in public.”

Realistically, though, something like 60% of Americans live in suburban America: close enough to a major city that they can go in for events, but far enough that they can feel that they’re isolated from crime or whatever. Nobody actually likes rural living, but some residents of suburban America likes romanticizing rural ideals while still living in an environment that gets the benefit of the economic engine of a nearby city, and the density to support a variety of restaurants and stores and activities. There’s an entire subculture of people who own $80,000 trucks and $3,000 guns, who have $200k+ jobs in the city but say their heart is in the country or whatever.

Stop arguing semantics. We’re done here.

Compare to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.

Yeah, if you want to make up your own definitions to the words you use, and then order those around you to stop arguing semantics, then you’re basically not having a conversation at all.

Your comment was confusing because you don’t seem to understand what is or isn’t part of an operating system, and the mere mention of the operating system was pretty far removed from any relevance to your own point.

It’s a proprietary service, and if you want to argue that companies can run proprietary services in a closed manner, denying access to third party clients, cool, that can be your position, but it would be an incoherent position to claim that only OS developers should have that right.

I’m raising kids in a walkable neighborhood.

At this point, my biggest concern is still that they’d get hit by a car. At their current young ages (under 5), they’re just not good about understanding where danger comes from when crossing the street or a driveway/alley entrance. Even later in life, I’m wondering how old they’ll have to be before I’m comfortable with them riding their bikes on city streets.

At some point, I expect it to pay off (they’ll be able to go to hang out with friends and bring themselves to school long before they turn 16). I’m just hoping I’ll be able to stay in a walkable neighborhood when they’re at those life stages, so that they can take advantage of the good stuff that this neighborhood has to offer.

I guess it’s a two-part observation. The first part does include a qualitative assessment of whether the destruction was “worth it.” The second part, though, I don’t think includes any moral assessment, just an observation that destruction is happening with or without us, so there’s plenty of creation that is possible from merely saving something from destruction, or leveraging an already-gonna-happen destruction to extract some creation out of it.

I don’t think of it as “destruction” so much as “consumption.” And there’s no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.

Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.

Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.

Moreover, even with a very generous definition of “destruction,” the comparison should still be made to what would’ve been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn’t made the sauce, what would’ve happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?

In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.

Organized sports with formal teams and team jerseys and calendars and refs was fun in my 20’s, but I was mainly doing pickup games by my 30’s. Now in my 40’s, I still do some participation in semi-organized leagues for inherently less serious sports, but it’s easy to enforce a “fun first” atmosphere when people are drinking beers while waiting their turn.

That all being said, I still do really enjoy individual, non-competitive sports where you’re trying to get your own personal best: weight lifting (whether powerlifting or olympic lifting), running, swimming, biking, etc. I like putting up better numbers than before, in all of those sports, even in a non-competitive environment. Or combinations of numbers (not my fastest 5k ever, but maybe my fastest 5k in the same month that I put up these deadlift numbers, etc.).

The competitive assholes are in youth sports, too, by the way. I think the last time I saw two 40-somethings almost get in a fist fight, they were dads at their daughters’ basketball game.

I’m slightly annoyed at my kid’s new school. My kid is getting ready for school in a Chinese immersion program, which is great, but the new school wants to gently ramp up with half days with parent participation, with only part of the class signed up for specific half-day blocks. This is annoying because parents, you know, have jobs to go to, and taking 3 hours in the middle of the workday to get the kid to school, stay with them for a half day, and bring them home early is pretty inconvenient. Plus the days my kid isn’t participating (with other half classes signed up), I’ve gotta get childcare coverage.

Can’t wait until we get to the normal 8:30am start time with regular after school care.