I kind of love pichação style. It looked really ugly to me at first, but then grew on me as I saw more of it. It feels alien and cryptic and uncomfortable to me as a Westerner. I understand being sick of it if you live there, but as a tourist, it felt special. Local graffiti styles have become so homogenized in the U.S. At one point, script styles were much more local. NY and Philly especially. Eventually, everyone sort of saw and bit off everyone else and it was no longer possibly to tell where a writer was from from their work. São Paulo has a definitely style. Not just the tags, but Batman Alley and the huge public murals. It was the best city I have ever been to for street art.
Graffiti can be beautiful, but it's a problem if it's on buildings that don't want it.
Where I live, stores are constantly fighting a battle against graffiti. They'll paint their walls, and people will graffiti them with ugly tags. People have graffitied over murals, which is just insane. One building had a huge piece of plywood on the wall as a spot where people could make street art. That worked for a few months until someone tagged the whole rest of the building too.
It's not like they're "fighting the man" or anything. These are all locally owned small businesses who are just trying to keep doing their thing.
In New Orleans (and surrounding areas), we have a large, dusty industry of salvaging old long leaf pine and either reusing it directly or re-milling larger pieces like beams into flooring etc. You can easily pick up old growth pine with tight grain here, but depending on where these kits sourced their wood, it is probably the wrong species. Might still be closer than anything you can find locally. If you ever make a trip to New Orleans, most salvage stores like The Bank, Riccas, Demo Diva etc will sell you a chunk of wood no problem.
If I were starting over, I would probably push for Google Chat. It was such a chore getting my workmates to switch to Slack from email, that I don't want to disturb the delicate balance. That said, Google Chat has less integrations and I don't trust Google to keep products around.
Besides the price, Google Meet is miles better than Slack video chat. I know most people just pay for Zoom, but for those of us that are stuck in Slack calls, Meet is a huge improvement.
I wonder if there is a tool to migrate all public messages from Slack to Google Chat?
The novelty of location based games never wore off for me, but the gameplay created by Niantic lost it's charm very quickly.
I hope Naiantic's failure will not doom location based gaming. I suffered through the meaningless grind of Pokemon GO for longer than I expected because I loved the human and exploring elements so much. Niantic stumbled on a brilliant idea and completely failed to make an engaging game. It is hard for me to exaggerate how good I think locations based games are and how bad Niantic is at making games.
There are so many possibilities in this space. I encourage any game maker interested to continue developing it. Maybe something that tells a story or solve a puzzle rather than just collect crap.
I think the biggest issue for location based apps is that no one except niantic have access to Google’s map data.
If that data was easily available, I imagine you’d see a lot of great location apps. It’s not hard to imagine the normal Pokémon games in the location setting, where you actually move around instead of moving an avatar around and “fight” Pokémon in different areas to “win” them, or go to “gyms” and battle with friends and what not.
You’d probably need to design the stranger meeting stranger part around having that sort of thing only happen in secure locations like in the DND/Warhammer shop, and everything on non secure locations be based on friend systems, but still, it’s not hard to imagine a good location based Pokémon game. It’s just that niantic won’t make it.
Maybe open street map can supply the data, but you’re never going to have access to Google’s real world live monitoring of the movement of everyone with a smartphone.
True. I work with media server playback stuff for live events etc. Back in the day, we only used mpeg2 constant bitrate codec because it allowed us to sync the playback across multiple systems. The first 4k videos we could play were just a slightly hacked version of mpeg2. The software I used adopted the extension .mxl and claimed they sort of invented a new thing, but truthfully, it was just an mpeg2 encoder/decoder that ignored that 4095 rule.
Now we use HAP family (DXT/S3 based) or NotchLC (which is a specialized codec for media servers that is fairly encumbered with patents).
Do you think it is because you rarely need to use the brake in a Tesla? My limited experiencing driving one was that simply removing your foot from the accelerator often provides sufficient braking power. Maybe you lose some muscle memory.
I know you are getting downvoted and a lot of gaff, but I do think you propose an interesting question. I am not sure what is illegal and what is not, but I am confident I support the strike.
So, let's say you are right. Would that make it illegal for all Uber drivers or strippers to strike? They are independent contractors, not employees. It also seems to me that these laws are created specifically to protect the consumer. Without damages, where is the crime? Even the example of the optometrists includes some theoretical damage to the consumer as the prices of their insurance could go up or the consumers had less access to eye care.
In the case of Etsy sellers though, I can not see how this could hurt consumers. Sellers are striking to lower the price of fees, which should help consumers and only hurt Etsy. I don't know the law, but I do feel like the law should be written in a way that these government agencies only act to prevent non-competitive activities that could hurt consumers.
It is not as good as it is on Android. I still have an iPhone, but this is the top thing that makes me consider switching back to Android. I will still probably buy another iPhone because of all the other good things about it. Still, I miss the Android keyboard choices.
That might be the only solution you can think of, but that does not make it the only possibility. What you are really saying is you don't think New Orleans is worth saving. New Orleans infrastructure consists of far more than just levees. Our pumping system is currently rated to remove 1 inch of rain the first hour and 1/2 inch each additional hour. We can remove this much rain with wooden screw pumps that still run on 25 cycle power. Upgrading or adding to the pumps in New Orleans to handle more water makes far more sense than giving up on what I believe is the most special city in America.
You say that nobody want to hear your hot take on abandoning New Orleans, a city with one of the most important ports in the country, yet I hear this proposed constantly (and upvoted) by people that have almost no specialized knowledge of infrastructure. It is armchair nihilism and imo not helpful at all. The army corps of engineers thinks differently. Agencies like the CPRA are working to restore land on the coast. There are ways to mitigate the damage, to reduce the risk and protect the city. Yes it is expensive. No it is not cheaper than losing our ports, our people, our culture.
Soon enough, if we don't invest in NOLA, you will likely be right, but I doubt it will be because there was no other option. It will be because we as a country made a huge mistake and failed to act.
The truth is, a lot of America does not care about people or cities in the south. New Orleans gets a bit more attention because tourists had a good time on Bourbon once, but overall it is treated as an oddity and not an essential piece of the both the economic and cultural fabric of America. There are people down here that feel the same way about California with its earthquakes and wild fires and I make similar arguments when arguing with them. Speaking of which, NYC fared far worse against the remnants of a storm we took head on. Should we abandon it or improve it? Hell no we should not give up on NYC, nor SF with it's earthquakes, or LA with it's water shortages, or Baltimore with its crime, or Detroit with its collapse of industry and definitely not New Orleans.
It's not the only solution I can think of, but it's the only practical one. Sure you could build giant sea walls around the area or bring in land and start literally raising all the buildings above sea level (similar to what Chicago did in the mid 1800s), but you are talking billions of dollars, maybe hundreds of billions. Once you get into that situation it just makes sense to move everything upstream and perhaps only fortify key infrastructure like ports until even those pieces have to be relocated.
The army corps of engineers is not given the option of not trying to save New Orleans. People in government tell them to go build levees and protect the city from flooding and they do the best job that they can, but they are fighting a losing war. The time to introduce relocation assistance programs is now, so you spread the cost and process out over many years; otherwise, you are going to just end up doing the same thing later, but it will cost more money and more lives will have been lost.
