I use Jimmy Buffet’s song “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude”, meaning head south to Key West to change your attitude. Ergo, latitude is north/south.
Having grown up in Indiana, and having watched a lot of drag racing, and even crewed for a friend drag racing motorcycles, I have not once wondered that, either. I, of course, just assumed it was that way everywhere. “What, your small nowhere town doesn’t have its own drag strip or dirt oval? How odd…”
(And when I say “nowhere”, I mean go look up Bunker Hill, IN as a go-to example. It’s a fine town as far as small towns go, but a long way from any major metro.)
100K kilometers? Even a Chevy Chevette could make it that far without major trouble. 100K miles, that’s about when 80s cars started to become more trouble than they were worth, IME.
Ah, got it. I have tried very hard to forget about 70s/80s Fiats. :-)
When is the last time you had a car undercoated?
I take your point, but the real answer is “when I lived the U. S. Midwest”, where they salt the roads. Since we moved to the milder climate of Washington state, even our ‘81 VW’s body is in great shape. But, yeah, in the 80s: straight from the dealer to the undercoat place.
Mandating sprinklers in apartments, but not in houses, is one of the myriad ways North America chose to make the construction of apartments uneconomical, and thus uncommon.
> Veiller, concerned with strategy, proposed that legislation to prevent multifamily housing use indirect methods because "zoning legislation will no doubt be fought strenuously and perhaps defeated." He
outlined an approach designed to make apartment construction, even of three-unit dwellings, prohibitively expensive:
> ‘Do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind.... If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three
families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds, because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power.... In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever’ (NHA Proceedings 1913, 212).
Wow, I heard about the weird dual staircase fire regulation thing (effectively requiring these horrible dystopian corridors), but I had no idea these regulations were that intentionally anti-apartment-building.
It’s not a long read and likely worth your time, but the TL;DR is turning a Switch into a network switch. Not a very fast switch, but it’s amazing that the pig sings in the first place.
My wife just retired, and with that went the work computer (that she rarely used for personal stuff to begin with). Now she uses her iPad. But that has the problems of no keyboard/mouse, so I gave her an old Apple keyboard and trackpad. But as parent points out, there's still a lot of touching going on. It's just not the setup for real work.
I find it particularly frustrating to watch, because she has an account on the weeks-old MBP I just bought (which will connect to a 27" monitor). But instead she'd rather just keep poking at that iPad screen while she complains about how hard it is to use: "I just don't get along with this Mac stuff." This woman worked at Microsoft for over fifteen years, she's not technically illiterate, but apparently it's easier to work with a horrible setup than to walk 20 feet down the hallway and put her finger on the fingerprint reader. :eyeroll:
EDIT: ninja’ed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065792
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