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[theinevitable]

I need to Get My Life In Order before an event occurs where I am using my personal computer at work and someone sees a naked lady. I used to have such good discipline about hiding the good stuff where it wouldn't accidentally appear, but at some point things got lax.

(that folder is called "let's be honest, you know what this is" because I am an Adult... but things escape, somehow)

[pmcd9]

(that folder is called "let's be honest, you know what this is" because I am an Adult... but things escape, somehow)

I call that folder 'Plain Brown Wrapper.'

[theinevitable]

In general, there are just constantly things popping up on my computer. Not like "pop-ups", but text messages and emails and stuff. I remember that very early after I got my iphone I had to figure out how to stop it from displaying the content of messages when it was locked, because my dad picked up my phone and handed it to me and there was a message about drugs on the screen. Still not sure if he saw that.

[theinevitable]

I know this is part of the human condition or whatever, but why don't people trying to convince me of things ever use historical facts or examples, instead of just stating their opinion in a stern voice? Am I the only person convinced by evidence? I have heard a lot of people say that land use zoning is stupid, or bad, or pointless, but none of them ever said things like:

• no other country has zoning like the US
• there is not very much evidence it accomplishes any of the things it is supposed to accomplish
• here is a list of pleasant places to live that developed naturally in countries that do not have zoning
• the US has fallen behind its peers in many of the measurements of things zoning is supposed to help, despite those peers not having zoning, or having much simpler/less intrusive zoning

This book commented that planners from highly regulated foreign countries cannot believe it when they learn how restrictive and complicated zoning is in the US. Ugh. Land of the free.

But really, ditto the above list for things like racism, sexism, etc. I am on your side once you give me some facts. In these cases I have been provided facts and now I am on your side. But why didn't anyone tell me those facts to begin with? Like, maybe a step before yelling at me about them?

Also realizing that people in my current department have really weird ideas about what certain words mean. You would think "culture" is a swear word. Ditto "social control." Today my teacher (not a professor, she is a professional planner) told us how mad it made her when someone told her that what she calls "case studies" are just fancy stories that don't prove anything. She tells a lot of anecdotes that are 100% hindsight bias about how it was OBVIOUS to ANYONE WITH A BRAIN that her brilliant plan would work, and all those naysayers were a bunch of idiots. Please ignore all the failed urban design projects all over the country, you should trust the professional immediately when they make big plans and bigger claims.

(she did tell a story today that cracked me up-- she and her partners showed a computer rendering with their park in bright green, and all of the surrounding buildings just as white silhouettes. The crowd was mad that they were proposing all the buildings be painted white, and demanded that they note that the buildings should be various colors.)

[theinevitable]

Better post:

Just now this script I was running to figure out what music files were duplicated between two locations on my computer crashed, with a message something like "out of storage space." Yes, I did Something Wrong and created a 203 GB text file. It is too big to open so I can't figure out what I did.

Update: >, which I meant to type, is "send output to this file." >>, which I typed, is "append output to this file." So as it created the output it was repeatedly adding the same info over and over. It added the first file, then the first file and the second file, then the first three files, then the first four files... until it was 213 gigabytes.

[Carlos del Vaca]

I know this is part of the human condition or whatever, but why don't people trying to convince me of things ever use historical facts or examples, instead of just stating their opinion in a stern voice?

Proof through vigorous assertion!

[pmcd9]

I know this is part of the human condition or whatever, but why don't people trying to convince me of things ever use historical facts or examples, instead of just stating their opinion in a stern voice? Am I the only person convinced by evidence? I have heard a lot of people say that land use zoning is stupid, or bad, or pointless, but none of them ever said things like:

• no other country has zoning like the US
• there is not very much evidence it accomplishes any of the things it is supposed to accomplish
• here is a list of pleasant places to live that developed naturally in countries that do not have zoning
• the US has fallen behind its peers in many of the measurements of things zoning is supposed to help, despite those peers not having zoning, or having much simpler/less intrusive zoning

This book commented that planners from highly regulated foreign countries cannot believe it when they learn how restrictive and complicated zoning is in the US. Ugh. Land of the free.

But really, ditto the above list for things like racism, sexism, etc. I am on your side once you give me some facts. In these cases I have been provided facts and now I am on your side. But why didn't anyone tell me those facts to begin with? Like, maybe a step before yelling at me about them?

There's no zoning in Houston and it's a clusterfuck! It wasn't so much of a problem before because it was so spread out here. Over the last 20 years or so they've been filling in all of those open spaces. What's best for the community... who cares! What's best for the developers bottom line is what matters.

[theinevitable]

Further into the book, it seems like the deal is this. In other countries they do not have such strong property rights. So they can have a loosey-goosey zoning system and if someone starts to build something real bad they can say "hey, no, you, stop." In the US that would get your city sued for unfair treatment, "taking" of property, etc. But zoning has been ruled constitutional, so they just make the zoning cover every possible bad thing, and use it as a tool to do whatever they want. Sure, we can't afford to build public housing, but we can use zoning to incentivize people to build cheap housing! etc.

The UK has the craziest system (from a US constitutional view), you have to apply to the planning board if you want to build anything at all. There isn't any "right" to build. France/Germany/others seem to have a system somewhere in between-- Paris for example has 4 or 5 types of zones, but the majority of the city is zoned as "general urban area." No country except the US has zones where you are only allowed to build detached single-family houses. It is nuts. The NYC zoning code is 3,000 pages long.

[wombat]

Those contrasts among countries make my brain hurt. Like we are supposed to be the country where everyone is free to do fuck-all, but we have 3000 page long zoning codes. And while it seems like actually it would be a good idea to have zoning codes to protect regular people from big companies doing fuck-all, it rarely seems to actually work that way.

[theinevitable]

Ah, but see, the most important right is the right to have your property values go up. So it makes total sense.

[theinevitable]

A stupid text adventure I created. It's called HamChat, and in it you explore a chatroom for horny hams. I made this for a party my friend had a few years ago where everyone made games using this engine-- puzzle games, RPGs, weird shit like my Ham game-- and we took turns playing them.

[theinevitable]

Yeah, making that game was the perfect investment vs payoff balance. I made it in about 25 minutes but got so many friends to crack up with it.

Last night I finished making a program to keep score in this board game my roommates and I have been playing. It turned out strangely complicated. This is the reverse: it was very satisfying and educational to make, but to the user it seems like a program that is equivalent to writing out the scores on a piece of paper. Good practice for understanding how to store data, although I think I probably did it in an overly complicated way.

[KeithHernandez]

No no no, you see, the problem is you only got ten.

I will always be able to recite the first verse of that song at warp speed.

https://vimeo.com/72540087

[theinevitable]

Come on chochachos, no posts since the board reset? do you think you're gonna break it?

Since then I've been drunk twice and read a few hundred pages of stupid legal cases, spent a few hours configuring text editors and window managers, talked to friends for hours, and ridden my bike for the first time in months. Nothing!?

[jaydub]

Didn't the barn just go up?  There's already enough hoss shit in there to attract flies?