Drawing on my career(s), dressing -- as distinct from fashion -- is mostly about making the other people comfortable. I did technology demonstrations off and on for years, and how to dress was always on my check-off list. The Mayo Clinic board of directors got full suit and tie; stock analysts got slacks and dress shirt; university profs got my standard jeans and a less-dressy button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. They all fit, and (perhaps most) importantly, I was comfortable wearing any of them.
Although I have to admit that the most respectful hearing I ever got from a room full of suits was on a Monday after a combination of a weekend skiing trip and hideous weather on the return drive meant I made an unscheduled presentation in a flannel shirt and three days worth of beard. I always figured it was so bad the suits thought, "If the Labs management is willing to let him present looking like that, he must be really good."
In many states, statutory or constitutional changes were made around 1970 that restricted the ability of the biggest cities in those states to annex. Here in Colorado, the Poundstone Amendment confined Denver. In Nebraska, state law was changed to block Omaha from annexing the attractive suburbs on its south side. As Jaybird would be quick to point out, yes, these changes coincided with white flight out of the urban cores.
Interesting. BosWash is its own thing, with differences in the split between rowhouse versus condo/apartment. Detroit's probably its own thing right now -- pretty much anyone with a job can find a single detached house if that's what they want (and as I usually say, there's reasonable evidence that two-thirds or so of the population globally prefers that if price isn't a problem). The interesting thing in the western cities (my West, represented by LA and Seattle) to me is the near-disappearance of the non-detached but less than ten units range. Adding something from the Southeast -- Atlanta or Miami -- would have been useful.
When the cities had their big population booms is clearly important -- which reflects not just the auto, but also how rich we were.
But why go out in a pair of shorts and an old ripped t-shirt from a sporting event that was 20 years ago or some shirt that looks like it was just grabbed and not even looked at or tried on for it.
I'm not that bad, but shorts and a t-shirt that fits and is sans rips... because I'm running my errands on the bike and it's 80 and sunny already. Because I'm mowing the grass. Because I'm going to the hardware store to get parts to fix the broken toilet. Most importantly, because it's part of the culture here. If you want to "dress", that's cool. But most of the people of all ages you'll see walking across the parking lot at the grocery in the middle of the day at this time of year will be in shorts. Jeans when it's colder. Running shoes.
Work costume is different. Jeans and a button-down oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up said "I'm a telecom tech weenie." Coat and tie said "I'm one of the legislative staff." 30-35 years ago there was more variety -- sometimes I'd wear a suit just because I wanted to look sharp (and knew that there was little chance that I'd be pulling cables under tables that day). Mostly what happened was a wife, a house, two kids, and the "costuming" budget got cut back sharply.
When I was working for the state legislature, coat and tie were mandatory when the members or staff were on the floor (corresponds to being in court for lawyers, I suppose). Women had some leeway about the tie, but were still required to wear a dress jacket of some sort. As there is no air conditioning in the Capitol, the person with the gavel would sometimes relax the coat rule. The budget staff director always said that the coat rule was never relaxed for his people -- as far as I could learn, it was a decades-old esprit de corps thing. Unlike the rest of the staff, the budget staff had offices in the building across the street. Late in the session, this led to the semi-regular sight of one of the staff sprinting across the street to handle an impromptu meeting on the floor, pulling their suit coat on as they ran.
You might be able to convince me if you say medium-term rather than long-term. But probably not.
I know how the following sounds in terms of bigotry and indifference to suffering and such. That makes me feel bad about believing it, but doesn't change my beliefs. The world lacks the energy resources to provide 7.5B people with a lifestyle approximating today's lower-middle-class life in the US or Europe or Japan. Optimistically, the world would need to produce twice as much high-quality energy as we do today. I go so far as to say that within the medium term (25-30 years), the US will struggle to produce the energy needed to support the population we will have at even 1% growth (on the order of 400M) in something like our present lower-middle-class lifestyle.
I know all the arguments about it only takes a fraction of the total solar insolation, or that fission could do the job for thousands of years. What no one has shown me is anything that looks even vaguely like a politically feasible investment plan to get us from here to there.
If they’ve noplace else to go, I think we do have an obligation to protect their quality of life.
Expand on this, please. Take the case of a Syrian subsistence farming family who were forced by the drought to leave their farm and go to an urban slum, who then fled the country because of the violence. Where and how do we protect their quality of life? And which quality of life? There are few places in the US, for example, where they could practice subsistence farming in the style they did in Syria. Or where a slum comparable to those in Syria would be tolerated. I'm not criticizing, I'm asking for clarification.
Well, the hard-core bunch, yeah, who aren't going to give up no matter how badly they lose. I have some acquaintances who will go to their graves believing it's possible to roll things back to 1890.
And that's despite the half-century since Goldwater which the progressives have clearly won. Even the last 15 years: Medicare Part D, Obamacare, a bigger federal role in K-12 education, gay marriage, and CO2 emissions regulation (years of bickering over the details remain, but the SCOTUS has blessed it unless the CAA is amended).
There was also the fiber bubble in the later 1990s, where 20 different companies were borrowing money from all sorts of sources, each with the claim that they would capture 20% of the long-haul data market. That Lucent was having to make loans itself would be a very bad sign -- those companies must have been even worse than the crap companies that were attracting the investment bankers. When the bubble burst, on the order of $2T in market value disappeared. A good deal of that fiber will never be lit, as it either goes to the wrong places, or is incompatible with new laser technology.
The consensus in the telecom industry is that Lucent's great financial performance on her watch was due to the late 1990s fiber bubble and a batch of very questionable accounting. She got out before the bubble burst. When it did, the company cratered.
Impact. To pick an example that's near me, the Colorado Gold Rush starting in 1859 and the Silver Boom twenty years later shaped the state in ways that are still important today (the claim that turned into the Gold King mine of recent orange river fame was filed in 1887). The fur trappers before that, almost nothing. Even the near-extinction of the bison didn't happen until the railroads arrived and made it practical to ship a million hides per year.
Speaking to the (very large) region that contemporary historians refer to as "the American West", which runs from roughly the center of the Great Plains to the Pacific... (1) Most of the common historical memes are myths in the sense of having been blown out of proportion. Eg, Texas cattle drives were a thing for all of 20 years, from the period when eastern-financed railroads got close enough to make them practical to the time when eastern-financed railroads were extended far enough to make the drives unnecessary. (2) If one were to pick the plucky individualist who made a difference, it's the prospector, not the cowboy or rancher or farmer. Of course, prospectors are a terrible role model for many different reasons. (3) The American West's population has, for almost its entire history, been very non-rural*. Today, the West is the second least-rural region after the Northeast. Four of the ten least-rural states are western (in recent censuses, California and New Jersey go back and forth as the leader).
* Census Bureau's definition of non-rural, the details of which have changed often over the years, but the statement is true for all of the definitions. Certainly from 1880 or so, if you lived in "the West" chances were good you lived in town, relatively close to one of the few cities.
I've seen versions of fonts that include one glyph but not the other. To some extent, fonts can be the kind of DLL hell that some of us used to suffer through -- no version numbers, upgrades break as much as they fix, etc. This is the kind of problem that has led to abominations like Font Awesome.
The clickable buttons are showing a thin rectangle instead of an arrow. Maybe an invalid character reference?
It renders properly on my screen. This does raise the philosophical question as to what makes an invalid character reference. The character code is a valid Unicode glyph; OTOH, lots of fonts fail to define the arrow glyphs. This is part of why I've made the Noto fonts my default -- Google has committed to defining every glyph at least up through Unicode 6.2 for them. The other reason is that with some spacing tweaks, the Noto Serif font is quite attractive.
Among the other complications is that the category is "Physiology and Medicine". Early winners were largely for medicine -- treatment of various diseases. Looking at the list you provided, it's almost exclusively physiology these days, with a heavy emphasis on protein chemistry and cell-level biology.
Maybe, if there was even one other club in the country that ran a tournament in this format. As it is, this is "sympathy software" that I wrote after watching the club coaches struggle through the scoring by hand.
Bout committee for our club's annual fencing tournament on Saturday afternoon. It's the longest continuously running tournament in Colorado. It's also an archaic team format that none of the standard tournament software will handle. This will be the second year I've used a piece of my own Python code to run the tournament.
I went to high school seven miles off the end of the runway at SAC headquarters. No one had ever bothered with civil defense drills because, well, there were so many Soviet nukes targeted that it wasn't going to matter. Everyone recognized the Looking Glass planes when they went overhead on their way up.
Just speculating, but I think the country-club Republican meme misses the mark these days -- there simply aren't enough of them to put up the kinds of numbers that do go up in the urban and inner-ring suburban areas. I think there's a broad swath that economically run from the working poor up through the bottom half of the middle class that have very traditional expectations from government -- good affordable schools, good roads, care for their aging relatives, reasonable regulation, no drugs on the streets. They don't want to go back to the kind of air that the LA Times highlighted in a flashback this week, but they don't care about the Preble's jumping mouse. Lots of them think their kids ought to go to State U to study business or engineering. They look at their pay stubs, or the company books for those who are small* business people, and think "lower taxes" is a good idea**. They live in the small detached single-family homes that make up much of the housing in most cities that was the source of much debate in the comments over at Lawyers, Guns and Money this week. They don't want to hear a "if only we all went back to living in imaginary small towns" message, because many of them (or their parents) fled the real small towns.
* Small small businesses -- the one-plumber plumbing company who uses a one-accountant accounting firm, etc.
** I'll admit that when I've done the one-person consulting bit, that 15% FICA tax starting on dollar one certainly tempts one to take a "taxes are too damned high" attitude.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A Defense of Fashion and Clothing”
Drawing on my career(s), dressing -- as distinct from fashion -- is mostly about making the other people comfortable. I did technology demonstrations off and on for years, and how to dress was always on my check-off list. The Mayo Clinic board of directors got full suit and tie; stock analysts got slacks and dress shirt; university profs got my standard jeans and a less-dressy button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. They all fit, and (perhaps most) importantly, I was comfortable wearing any of them.
Although I have to admit that the most respectful hearing I ever got from a room full of suits was on a Monday after a combination of a weekend skiing trip and hideous weather on the return drive meant I made an unscheduled presentation in a flannel shirt and three days worth of beard. I always figured it was so bad the suits thought, "If the Labs management is willing to let him present looking like that, he must be really good."
On “The Way We Live”
In many states, statutory or constitutional changes were made around 1970 that restricted the ability of the biggest cities in those states to annex. Here in Colorado, the Poundstone Amendment confined Denver. In Nebraska, state law was changed to block Omaha from annexing the attractive suburbs on its south side. As Jaybird would be quick to point out, yes, these changes coincided with white flight out of the urban cores.
"
Interesting. BosWash is its own thing, with differences in the split between rowhouse versus condo/apartment. Detroit's probably its own thing right now -- pretty much anyone with a job can find a single detached house if that's what they want (and as I usually say, there's reasonable evidence that two-thirds or so of the population globally prefers that if price isn't a problem). The interesting thing in the western cities (my West, represented by LA and Seattle) to me is the near-disappearance of the non-detached but less than ten units range. Adding something from the Southeast -- Atlanta or Miami -- would have been useful.
When the cities had their big population booms is clearly important -- which reflects not just the auto, but also how rich we were.
On “A Defense of Fashion and Clothing”
But why go out in a pair of shorts and an old ripped t-shirt from a sporting event that was 20 years ago or some shirt that looks like it was just grabbed and not even looked at or tried on for it.
I'm not that bad, but shorts and a t-shirt that fits and is sans rips... because I'm running my errands on the bike and it's 80 and sunny already. Because I'm mowing the grass. Because I'm going to the hardware store to get parts to fix the broken toilet. Most importantly, because it's part of the culture here. If you want to "dress", that's cool. But most of the people of all ages you'll see walking across the parking lot at the grocery in the middle of the day at this time of year will be in shorts. Jeans when it's colder. Running shoes.
Work costume is different. Jeans and a button-down oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up said "I'm a telecom tech weenie." Coat and tie said "I'm one of the legislative staff." 30-35 years ago there was more variety -- sometimes I'd wear a suit just because I wanted to look sharp (and knew that there was little chance that I'd be pulling cables under tables that day). Mostly what happened was a wife, a house, two kids, and the "costuming" budget got cut back sharply.
"
Collectively, they are "peafowl".
On “The Value of Diluting your Brand”
What makes you think they were actual Red Wings rather than counterfeits?
"
When I was working for the state legislature, coat and tie were mandatory when the members or staff were on the floor (corresponds to being in court for lawyers, I suppose). Women had some leeway about the tie, but were still required to wear a dress jacket of some sort. As there is no air conditioning in the Capitol, the person with the gavel would sometimes relax the coat rule. The budget staff director always said that the coat rule was never relaxed for his people -- as far as I could learn, it was a decades-old esprit de corps thing. Unlike the rest of the staff, the budget staff had offices in the building across the street. Late in the session, this led to the semi-regular sight of one of the staff sprinting across the street to handle an impromptu meeting on the floor, pulling their suit coat on as they ran.
On “On To Germany… Or Somewhere?”
You might be able to convince me if you say medium-term rather than long-term. But probably not.
I know how the following sounds in terms of bigotry and indifference to suffering and such. That makes me feel bad about believing it, but doesn't change my beliefs. The world lacks the energy resources to provide 7.5B people with a lifestyle approximating today's lower-middle-class life in the US or Europe or Japan. Optimistically, the world would need to produce twice as much high-quality energy as we do today. I go so far as to say that within the medium term (25-30 years), the US will struggle to produce the energy needed to support the population we will have at even 1% growth (on the order of 400M) in something like our present lower-middle-class lifestyle.
I know all the arguments about it only takes a fraction of the total solar insolation, or that fission could do the job for thousands of years. What no one has shown me is anything that looks even vaguely like a politically feasible investment plan to get us from here to there.
"
If they’ve noplace else to go, I think we do have an obligation to protect their quality of life.
Expand on this, please. Take the case of a Syrian subsistence farming family who were forced by the drought to leave their farm and go to an urban slum, who then fled the country because of the violence. Where and how do we protect their quality of life? And which quality of life? There are few places in the US, for example, where they could practice subsistence farming in the style they did in Syria. Or where a slum comparable to those in Syria would be tolerated. I'm not criticizing, I'm asking for clarification.
On “Sunday!”
I will probably never get used to keeping track of whether I'm logged in to WordPress in a different tab. At least my gravatar remains unchanged.
"
Recently, I am trying hard to use the time that I would otherwise spend reading to write.
On “Carly vs the Demon Sheep, the Sequel, or: Second (or Third and Fourth) Republican Debate(s) Reactions”
Well, the hard-core bunch, yeah, who aren't going to give up no matter how badly they lose. I have some acquaintances who will go to their graves believing it's possible to roll things back to 1890.
And that's despite the half-century since Goldwater which the progressives have clearly won. Even the last 15 years: Medicare Part D, Obamacare, a bigger federal role in K-12 education, gay marriage, and CO2 emissions regulation (years of bickering over the details remain, but the SCOTUS has blessed it unless the CAA is amended).
"
There was also the fiber bubble in the later 1990s, where 20 different companies were borrowing money from all sorts of sources, each with the claim that they would capture 20% of the long-haul data market. That Lucent was having to make loans itself would be a very bad sign -- those companies must have been even worse than the crap companies that were attracting the investment bankers. When the bubble burst, on the order of $2T in market value disappeared. A good deal of that fiber will never be lit, as it either goes to the wrong places, or is incompatible with new laser technology.
"
The consensus in the telecom industry is that Lucent's great financial performance on her watch was due to the late 1990s fiber bubble and a batch of very questionable accounting. She got out before the bubble burst. When it did, the company cratered.
On “Idiocy, Week One”
Impact. To pick an example that's near me, the Colorado Gold Rush starting in 1859 and the Silver Boom twenty years later shaped the state in ways that are still important today (the claim that turned into the Gold King mine of recent orange river fame was filed in 1887). The fur trappers before that, almost nothing. Even the near-extinction of the bison didn't happen until the railroads arrived and made it practical to ship a million hides per year.
"
Speaking to the (very large) region that contemporary historians refer to as "the American West", which runs from roughly the center of the Great Plains to the Pacific... (1) Most of the common historical memes are myths in the sense of having been blown out of proportion. Eg, Texas cattle drives were a thing for all of 20 years, from the period when eastern-financed railroads got close enough to make them practical to the time when eastern-financed railroads were extended far enough to make the drives unnecessary. (2) If one were to pick the plucky individualist who made a difference, it's the prospector, not the cowboy or rancher or farmer. Of course, prospectors are a terrible role model for many different reasons. (3) The American West's population has, for almost its entire history, been very non-rural*. Today, the West is the second least-rural region after the Northeast. Four of the ten least-rural states are western (in recent censuses, California and New Jersey go back and forth as the leader).
* Census Bureau's definition of non-rural, the details of which have changed often over the years, but the statement is true for all of the definitions. Certainly from 1880 or so, if you lived in "the West" chances were good you lived in town, relatively close to one of the few cities.
On “Culinary History, Not So Obscure After All”
Very nice. One of the "hidden" take-aways is a reminder of just how new the current version of the American West is.
On “Comments Since Last Visit, Reloaded, Augmented, Installed, In Two Steps”
I've seen versions of fonts that include one glyph but not the other. To some extent, fonts can be the kind of DLL hell that some of us used to suffer through -- no version numbers, upgrades break as much as they fix, etc. This is the kind of problem that has led to abominations like Font Awesome.
"
Need another new comment to look at something.
"
The clickable buttons are showing a thin rectangle instead of an arrow. Maybe an invalid character reference?
It renders properly on my screen. This does raise the philosophical question as to what makes an invalid character reference. The character code is a valid Unicode glyph; OTOH, lots of fonts fail to define the arrow glyphs. This is part of why I've made the Noto fonts my default -- Google has committed to defining every glyph at least up through Unicode 6.2 for them. The other reason is that with some spacing tweaks, the Noto Serif font is quite attractive.
On “The Saga of the Fighter”
Among the other complications is that the category is "Physiology and Medicine". Early winners were largely for medicine -- treatment of various diseases. Looking at the list you provided, it's almost exclusively physiology these days, with a heavy emphasis on protein chemistry and cell-level biology.
On “Weekend!”
Maybe, if there was even one other club in the country that ran a tournament in this format. As it is, this is "sympathy software" that I wrote after watching the club coaches struggle through the scoring by hand.
"
Bout committee for our club's annual fencing tournament on Saturday afternoon. It's the longest continuously running tournament in Colorado. It's also an archaic team format that none of the standard tournament software will handle. This will be the second year I've used a piece of my own Python code to run the tournament.
On “Linky Friday #130: Martyrs & Migrants”
I went to high school seven miles off the end of the runway at SAC headquarters. No one had ever bothered with civil defense drills because, well, there were so many Soviet nukes targeted that it wasn't going to matter. Everyone recognized the Looking Glass planes when they went overhead on their way up.
"
Just speculating, but I think the country-club Republican meme misses the mark these days -- there simply aren't enough of them to put up the kinds of numbers that do go up in the urban and inner-ring suburban areas. I think there's a broad swath that economically run from the working poor up through the bottom half of the middle class that have very traditional expectations from government -- good affordable schools, good roads, care for their aging relatives, reasonable regulation, no drugs on the streets. They don't want to go back to the kind of air that the LA Times highlighted in a flashback this week, but they don't care about the Preble's jumping mouse. Lots of them think their kids ought to go to State U to study business or engineering. They look at their pay stubs, or the company books for those who are small* business people, and think "lower taxes" is a good idea**. They live in the small detached single-family homes that make up much of the housing in most cities that was the source of much debate in the comments over at Lawyers, Guns and Money this week. They don't want to hear a "if only we all went back to living in imaginary small towns" message, because many of them (or their parents) fled the real small towns.
* Small small businesses -- the one-plumber plumbing company who uses a one-accountant accounting firm, etc.
** I'll admit that when I've done the one-person consulting bit, that 15% FICA tax starting on dollar one certainly tempts one to take a "taxes are too damned high" attitude.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.