It's precisely because I have kids that I prioritize a walkable place. Because kids can't drive!
So in car-dependent places, they have no autonomy until they're nearly adults. I think it's much more healthy for them to slowly and steadily expand their autonomy, rather than a sudden discontinuous break when they learn to drive.
The same argument applies in reverse to old people too. In places with good transit and walkability they can stay independent and active longer, with no sudden loss of freedom when they can no longer safely drive vehicles at high speed.
Walking and transit are both overwhelmingly safer than cars (most things are).
When kids are small you just push them in a stroller. Once they're too big for a stroller, they're big enough to walk everywhere that you can walk. It's really not that complicated. Suburban kids who never walk anywhere may whine about needing to walk two miles, but my kids have been doing that since before they could walk unassisted, it's perfectly normal to them.
I do also have a Dutch-style cargo bike which we use a lot around our neighborhood. It's wonderful.
I think as you gain more experience and perspective you will look back and realize that you simply weren't upper middle class yet. It's not about income (which is just a point-in-time metric that can change in an instant), it's about assets.
Programmers have a much better shot at establishing this kind of security than most people, because you should be making 2x to 3x median income for your area, which means you can live on 1x median income and invest the rest.
A lot of the people I've worked with as a programmer over the past 14 years have done effectively that, so by now they have a lot of assets. That is what upper middle class security looks like.
What nobody told this unfortunate person is that working for a tech company is not the same as being a tech worker.
I'm not defending the two-tier system inside many tech companies, just pointing out that it's real and it's maintained by market forces bigger than any one company.
If a big Seattle software company lays off a team of programmers, recruiters are swarming around them by the end of the same day.
Yours is a pretty weird description of the current real estate market here in Somerville.
It's a pretty even mix of owners and renters (about 40%/60% last I checked). Because of all the factors in the article, huge amounts of money are flowing in and they're being spent on upgrading the housing stock. Far from "shitty and falling apart", you see gleaming post-restoration projects everywhere, at astronomical prices.
Maybe I'm biased toward the west end of the city because I live there and the gentrification is furthest along here. But "it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements. The market remains extremely hot, and it's being fed by people with money who want to buy and live here, not absentee landlords. There are still some of those, but it's a shrinking group because the overwhelming financial incentive is to gut-renovate and sell as condos.
As for increasing the density, I'm all for it, but it's worth pointing out Somerville is already the densest city in New England. Denser than Boston proper, despite all Boston's own high rises. You don't find a denser city until you get to NYC. People underestimate how effectively you can pack a city even at three-to-five stories tall, if you actually stick to that height _everywhere_. We were lucky to be built in the streetcar era, and then ignored through the incredibly-dumb architectural trends of the second half of the 20th century. If the rest of Greater Boston was merely as dense as Somerville there would be no housing shortage.
My favorite strategy for getting higher density here is killing all the parking lots, along with simply getting our transit system back to the scope and quality it had in 1930, with streetcar lines all over the place.
Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.
One bit of feedback:
> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.
A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.
The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.
Sure, but I think many programmers underestimate the investment value of that time.
Diving into codebases is a skill that gets stronger with use, such that you can eventually do it radically faster. That makes a much larger set of problems economically practical to fix.
You're basically describing asm.js -- a subset of javascript that is known to be easy for engines to turn directly into native code and execute, that you can use as a compilation target.
The difference between asm.js and WASM is mostly just that WASM is more compact and easier to parse, while asm.js is a more gradually compatible upgrade story.
The problem with this kind of deep dive optimization is the cost of maintaining it in a long-lived project as the underlying javascript engines keep changing. What was optimal for one version of V8 can actually be detrimental in another version, or in another browser.
It's precisely the unpredictability of JIT-driven optimizations that makes WASM so appealing. You can do all your optimizing once at build time and get consistent performance every time it runs.
It's not that plain Javascript can't be as fast -- it's that plain Javascript has high variance, and maintaining engine-internals-aware optimization in a big team with a long-lived app is impractical.
If you are running your own webserver even a static simple site has required maintenance. You need to keep the server and OS patched. So adding a letsencrypt cron job is not any worse than configuring something like Debian's unattended-upgrades.
But I don't think most site owners should be doing even that much. They should just pay for static hosting, which is cheap and ensures somebody else will keep the server, os, and cert all safe.
There is a saving grace here, which is that almost nobody who would ship a new grid-based design today is shipping only one layout. They're shipping a family of layouts for different devices.
And once you have a family of layouts, it's not a big deal to add one more layout that covers non-grid-capable browsers.
The design choice that makes this all tenable is to accept that the site isn't supposed to look identical across every browser. You're accepting that you'll do progressive enhancement of layout. Old browsers still get all the content, they will just get it in a more boring format (like all stacked into a single column).
They save people from serious injury much more frequently than that. Extreme turbulence that can smash you against the ceiling happens not infrequently.
> Getting off GMail is one of the best ways to take back your data in the face of dragnet surveillance.
This just isn't true. You can host your own mail server and GMail will probably still end up hosting a large fraction of the email you read and write, because the people you correspond with are still using GMail.
(In the same vein, you can refuse to have a Facebook account but Facebook probably has a dossier on you anyway. Enough people you know have dumped their contacts into Facebook that they already know your place in the social graph.)
> If the desirable employees, and the capitalists who want to actively oversee their investments weren't already in the more expensive areas
Most of those people were out in cheaper areas 40 years ago, when suburbia was still ascendant. So "they just happen to already be there" doesn't explain what we observe today.
> or if there weren't costs to both associated with regular travel
That is just restating why walkable cities are nice to be in: travel has costs, being close to things means less travel.
> if jobs moving to the new place wouldn't actually turn it into a more expensive, denser place
That clearly didn't actually happen when the jobs first migrated to the suburbs. The suburbs remained suburbs. The jobs were in low density office parks.
> Outside of this strange vocal minority that shows up here, very few people would actually prefer to live in an urban area
If that was really true it would create a huge arbitrage opportunity for people to make billions of dollars by building their businesses out in cheaper areas.
> The high paying/skilled jobs are there
Yes, but the question is why? If most people don't want to be in cities as you say, that would also include business owners, who could save a ton of money by moving their businesses into cheaper areas and paying lower rents and wages.
But that's not happening, on net. We're seeing the reverse. Businesses that fled to the suburbs 60 years ago are steadily moving back into cities.
Many of these are sober, fortune 500 companies that wouldn't be moving if they didn't see a clear economic reason to do it. It's not some "strange vocal minority" position.
We are returning to the long-term average for civilization since the first cities began 6000 years ago: cities are the centers of economic activity and power. America went through a weird inversion for two generations where that wasn't true. We're now reverting to the mean.
People always focus on these extreme endpoints, but to get a vibrant walkable neighborhood you don't need anything remotely close to New York or Tokyo densities.
My street in Somerville, MA has a WalkScore (91) that's higher than the average score for New York city (89), yet every building in my neighborhood is detached and three stories tall. I have a back yard with grass. Not a big one, but it feels nothing like lower Manhattan. And I can walk or bike to literally everything I need in a given week.
People equate "crowded" and "ugly" with "walkable" when it's just not accurate. Being more green and more attractive is literally one of the components of being walkable, because people need to actually want to walk.
This is a strong contrast with my experience in trying to patch the vulnerability on an Asus desktop motherboard.
The process was so byzantine that I very much doubt more than a small fraction of home users would get through it, or even bother starting.
The correct steps were (1) flash a newer bios, (2) install the Intel ME driver for windows, (3) run the actual vulnerability patching tool. Discovering those steps required a bunch of trial and error and navigating Asus's really terrible website full of badly named downloads.
As for cold, the kids can stay under a bubble canopy if it's really bad. I have this bike, though we've never bothered with a canopy, we just dress them warm (in New England): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=workcycles%20kr8%20...: