UK voted to sell itself out to rich people with mobile capital when they decided to stop being a manufacturing country and start being a finance country. That started in the 1980s and hasn't stopped since (witness Labour only ruling when they became "New Labour" stripping out all the too-Laboury bits). Plus it's hard to feel bad for people who reaped the benefits of colonizing half the world not too long ago.
Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One might inquire what the First Nations think about white man's towers of glass and Vancouver Specials in what used to be beautiful temperate rainforest...
> For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life.
Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?
> It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. ... But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
Don't worry. If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
(Really brief history for those from outside the region: ethnic-Europeans have been ruling British Columbia for less than two hundred years.)
> There are a lot of ways to do that, and many of them involve the current team members being proactive about going out and trying to recruit someone to fill that role.
Orrrr the current team members can be proactive and do something that will reduce the number of bad bug reports they get.
No, I'm not actually suggesting that he should volunteer.
But saying "surely someone can just volunteer" is pointless in the absence of evidence that someone actually wants to volunteer. If anything the evidence points to not enough volunteer triage PMs - the OSS world is not short on projects that could use a triager.
> I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission.
Great, so now they've all resigned and we're back to the start with no idea how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge.
Best ask StackOverflow.
> Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed.
You have a long day ahead of you if you want to rant about non-open licensed academic papers
This is completely untrue. You can't look for planning information the same way you look for code snippets. This is like looking for medical research on Youtube. StackOverflow? Try https://www.planning.org/ and the Journal of the American Planning Association.
As well, in any profession with large public impact, there is a gap between what the professionals know and what the public accepts. A planner can tell you how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge, but it might not be so simple for a politician to convince people to pay millions, or worse, alter their lifestyle to make it happen.
To give an example: do you think economists and policy professionals don't have a lot of ideas to simplify and improve the tax code? Then why aren't they implemented? Because lobbying and special interests, because talk radio, because social equality, because families, because people think of themselves as impoverished millionaires, because messy real-life stuff.
You can log into an @gmail.com Hangouts account through XMPP. The instructions on https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoGtalk worked for my account which is also accessed by Hangouts on Android L.
(At least person-to-person messaging works well - I have not attempted group chats or video or stuff)
Honestly, I agree, and I love having my house low-tech and simple. The best solution is avoiding the problem altogether.
But your argument can be advanced against electric light. I could do just fine with candles in my house. But in 2016 I'm not going to go back to candles, even if electricity isn't really saving me that much time or money.
Imagine in 2050 never having to turn on the lights again because they will turn on automatically and that will work well. Never deal with carrying things and reaching over with your elbow. It won't add more than $200 of value to your life, but will you actively opt out of it?
It's not that "IoT" will make your life vastly more efficient and save you tons of money. It's that when it's easy enough and good enough, it will become the new normal as mains electricity is now. Currently it's a buggy gadget, but so was every technology once.
Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently.
A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before.
Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can do it reliably, there's clearly some value. Compare, for instance, lighting a candle when you get home with just flicking the switch for those newfangled electric lights. The candle works but the technology is more convenient.
Of course, electricity doesn't give you failwhales these days, and there's a bit more engineering involved than "move fast and break things."
