Not a chemist…but if someone can carry on 3 bottles at 3.4 ounces each, now they have 10 ounces.
Two people do it and it’s 20 ounces. All within the “TSA Standard.”
This is where the liquid limit never made sense to me…if we were serious about keeping these substances off of planes, we would limit the total liquid…right? Or require that any liquids get checked.
I just don’t see how per-bottle liquid limits are anything close to deterrent for motivated attackers…but they sure are deterrent for me when I forget that I put a hotel water bottle in my bag.
This is becoming less of an issue, but there’s no question it’s a barrier.
To be honest, the bigger barrier I see is around political will to charge the true social cost of gasoline.
Some nonprofits think the true cost of burning gas is $10-15/gallon. If filling up with gas cost $250 and charging an EV was 85% cheaper, I’d be willing to wait 30 minutes for an occasional charge.
Books by Peter Bevelin (From Darwin to Munger etc.) or Rolf Dobelli are decent compilations. But mental models are everywhere. Taleb's books have a bunch. But start with what you have in front of you: pick one and actually apply it programmatically, then add to your repertoire one at a time.
I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
I feel like you've proven the point in the opposite direction. A software startup may be competing with Salesforce as an alternative. That would be worth pursuing as a software startup. You've laid the case that it's better and easier to create internal tools and not rely on Salesforce or an alternative solution. It's easy to roll-your-own so you don't pay outside companies for this solution any more. This does not bode well for a software startup (maybe it bodes well for you as an engineer working on that project, but that's not a software startup).
I feel like most "solutions" that are really just "platforms" and require extensive customization and integration will suffer due to this. It's easy to just roll your own these days.
I wrote an article[0] on Tiny Neighborhoods (aka “Cohousing”) that starts with:
> “I often wonder if the standard approach to housing is the best we can do. About 70% of Americans live in a suburb, which means that this design pattern affects our lives – where we shop, how we eat, who we know – more than any other part of modern life.”
We have been so uncritical of the set of ideas that make suburbia—single family homes, one car per adult, large private yards—even though these play a big role in how people act.
Some people want to address loneliness by making incremental changes. But if the statistics are right and nearly everyone is somewhat lonely, we should expect that the required adjustments feel “drastic” compared to the current norm.
People would be less lonely if they could live in a community of 15-20 families with (1) shared space and (2) shared expectations for working together on their shared space.
I posted on another subthread but I think this is largely an excuse. If you live in a typical suburb you have 15-20 families on your street. You can easily walk next door and chat or just say hello when you see someone outside. It takes initiative, which is the key thing that's missing. You either hide in your house or you get out and be sociable.
> You can easily walk next door and chat or just say hello when you see someone outside.
I have no problem with socialization and I have an unusually-active social life for a thirty-eight year old married man with three kids, so I clearly don't lack initiative.
With that being said, all of my neighbors are either elderly, shut-ins, or just don't want to be bothered; even the ones with kids.
My wife & I helped organize a Block Party last year and I'm fairly certain it resulted in 0 new friendships for any of the attendees.
What's the solution here? Friendships need to have mutual interest, no?
I think it's a circular problem. Like, my kids don't go outside much because there are no other kids outside to play with.
There's no question that there are 15-20 families within 300 yards of my house. But that group of people absolutely does not have a sense of shared anything but the road.
And the fact is that this is true of the supermajority of suburban streets in the United States.
I don't disagree but 30 years ago the people in those kinds of neighborhoods did get out and talk to each other, did organize cookouts and other gatherings, and in general were sociable neighbors. The people changed.
The greed of wall street and the powers that be bubbles down. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with property values and insurance and strict HOA regs. The purpose of housing in the USA has nothing to do with families or people, it is an investment for growing wealth, and nothing more. If you treat a house like a home, you are negatively affecting your property value and net worth (and your neighbors.)
the noise and unseemliness of cookouts and other gatherings negatively affects property value. That's the sort of thing you see in scary bad neighborhoods on TV. Just drive 45 minutes to the strip mall 6 miles away and gather at one of the corporate chain establishments.
I live in a completely different city, a post-soviet one, with dense streets, 9-storey apartment buildings. But still it's hard to socialize. It's the same both in the center, and on the fringe with large micro-districts, where the density is the same, but people are less in haste, and there are less strangers. Same way, people are avoidant.
Like in subway you pretend that others don't exist, and it's hard to get closer with people. It can take months or years to start saying hello to a kiosk salesman you recognize. It's hard to get past by hello with the house neighbors. If you make steps forward, people are unease. Sometimes others are too quick with their steps, you get unease.
The most compelling theory I know is that you need to meet people occasionally, without intention, to deepen the relationships. If all your communication with someone is intentional, I guess, this feels awkward for both sides. I can confirm this from experience: living in a 80K town, I'd walk down the main street to the little shopping mall with a local supermarket for groceries, and would meet people I knew, or friends, and sometimes we'd go walking by the streets, with groceries bag in my hand :) or we planned to meet in 15 minutes. Or go to each other's home. This is hard to replicate in a big city, where even if you see a friend, he/she is usually in a hurry.
Near apartment blocks, there's no porch or garden or park, and even where there is one, I don't see locals sitting there regularly. People are very cautious, even suspicious of benches, because if there's a busy street nearby, once in a year there'll be a group of noisy young people sitting late at night, or one drunkard in a year, and everyone will get pissed off and want the bench removed. (If they allow to install it at all.)
Looking at some places, I theorized that maybe there should be a place where you could sit and let's say play board games _near_ those who come in and out. And of course, it should be indoors, because winters are long and cold. But But I'm not sure of a communal place indoors either. It could become a magnet for homeless, it can be a magnet for just the slacker drinking old men, and repel the rest of people. I've seen too many communities become place repulsive for "normies". Maintenance is a big question too.
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