Android still has a great edge by offering Multiple user feature on their tablets (rip?) and phones. Unless you have an iPad and iPhone for each child, or only have one child, the iOS management features are still not flexible enough.
This is why I keep a bunch of equipment by default on an isolated subnet where the router drops all packets to the outside world. Doesn't matter what the device is trying to do.
Connecting to these devices requires one level of indirect - where I connect first to an internal machine that can send packets to/from the hidden subnet.
Some ideas are ancient. The painting doesn't have to move. The money doesn't have to move. We just all agree to assign it to someone else.
"Because these stones are too large to move, buying an item with one simply involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person it is passed on to and no physical movement of the stone is required."
Sadly, this appears to be true. Tons of art just sits in secure warehouses like gold bars, never seen by anyone. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-oper... (I've never heard of Rybolovlev before, but his name comes up in this article as well.)
E.g. intuitively grokking the Maillard reaction, fond, deglazing, etc.
In my experience with beginners - the number one error they make is not understanding their heat source and pans. For example, they'll put oil in a thin pan, turn on the burner and drop in a chicken breast right from the fridge and wonder why its not done in 6 minutes.
My advice to beginners cooking on stove tops: get a cast iron skillet - treat it with love and kindness. Let it warm up for a bit before you start cooking.
Good advice considering cast iron is super cheap to buy. You need heavy cookware that can hold heat and it's super important to get the pan hot first and as you said, let the meat sit out for 30m-1h before cooking it. Dry the meat as well and salt a good 45m before cooking to draw moisture out of the thin surface areas and then sear in a hot pan.
I usually use Falk copper cookware (but have some cast iron too when I want a ton of heat that stays hot) since it gets super hot but also has the added ability to change temperatures quickly. So when cooking, I have control and can start hot and take it off the burner to rapidly get the pan temperature down and then back up if I want to start creating a sauce from the fond, deglazing, etc.
But I wouldn't recommend someone spending $300-$500 per copper pan when they're getting started! Cast iron is a great place to start - and if taken care of, will last you forever.
My daily mix is a couple of cast iron skillets and all-clad stainless steel saucepans. The combination is perfect for me.
Just looked over the Falk line - absolutely beautiful. I've never considered copper cookware. What benefits do you get? How much time in maintenance do you spend? Do you have to clean and polish the copper bottoms of your pans weekly? I periodically pull out BKF and polish my all-clads - but it isn't necessary.
Yeah, the Falk stuff is pretty top notch. They actually produce the copper for other major brands too.
All-clad is great stuff. The copper stuff distributes heat a bit more evenly and also has more temperature control. It reacts a bit faster to changes in temperature and is more precise in holding a temperature and not creating hotspots. Very useful especially when making sauces or trying to keep precise temperature on something like a reduction that you don't want to boil.
In terms of maintenance I clean the insides with BKF (the most magical cleaner on Earth) which is a thin stainless steal lining and I don't really polish the outsides - just soap and water. I prefer the patina look and because Falk doesn't polish the outsides and uses a brushed finish it really looks nice after many, many uses IMO.
This is exceptionally true. Half of cooking is understanding that (with the exception of baking), most of what you're doing doesn't have to be terribly exact, but the technique is really the key of what's happening. Like any other skill, it just takes a bit of practice to catch on to what's going down, and some people catch on more quickly than others.
Good for Redfin. Disruption in any business that charges 6% transaction fees is great.
Having said that, real estate transactions are complex beasts with many moving parts. A lot of this process can be scripted and templated. But there are many situations where it cannot. Buyers and sellers are under immense stress as they face very large financial and legal decisions. They don't understand the process, the terminology, the legal and financial consequences, etc. There are local regulations and conventions that differ from region to region. E.g: Check out the differences in who pays fees across counties: http://chicagotitletransfertax.com/
Good agents absolutely earn their fees when uncertainty and complexity arise. I suspect Redfin is seeking to carve out the part of the market that comprises straight-forward, template driven transactions.
I think people should generally have professional help in buying or selling a house. But the rates that brokers charge is out-of-step with the help they provide.
For example, in a $600,000 house in an urban area, the two brokers earn $36,000. But I just bought a house without a broker, and hired a real estate lawyer. Not only was the lawyer much more versed in legal details of the transaction, but he wound up charging me $500. Yes, he didn't drive out and hold my hand, but he was extremely knowledgeable and knew exactly what to look out for in all steps of the transaction.
In my experience, whenever the question of broker commissions comes up, people come out to defend the expert advice of the real estate agent and argue that people shouldn't "go it alone" because the transaction is complex. And, generally, it's true that people probably should not go it alone on an expensive transaction such as buying or selling a home. But the agent's advice is often mediocre, and they still lack the detailed understanding of real estate transaction rules and law that a real estate lawyer provides. So why pay the agent thirty times as much as someone with more experience and formalized, specialized education in the area? The only remaining reason is "marketing", which is the service that is greatly devalued in the age of online brokers.
Sometimes transactions stick at the strangest places. For example, a buyer balks at paying a final $500 fee allotted to him because he has hit his financial stress limit - potentially killing the entire transaction.
Good agents are not just facilitating the transaction, but also acting as friends/confidants/therapists for buyers&sellers - helping them make responsible decisions. Good agents also come up with creative solutions to complete transactions - this pops up often in resolving inspection contingencies. Say there is some leakage discovered underneath a bathroom sink with some cabinetry damage. The buyer is getting cold feet. What do you do?
Focusing global political will into action to address climate change is hard.
What is depressing is that even when local benefits are present, it is challenging to enact policy. Case in point: the folks over at Citylab periodically write about the loss of urban forests.
Look at the attached map, even the liberal enclaves of Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan Beach, BelAir, Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills show tree cover loss.
We need a new 'Manhattan project' to find and enforce a solution.
The best and brightest minds from all over the world in one place, focusing on this issue 24/7. The situation cannot be underestimated anymore.
Realistically, we can't expect people to live peacefully in lands without food and water. This is going to kickstart the biggest migratory wave in history.
Would you preserve a tree at the expense of a large apartment building in a walkable are that would let a few hundred people switch from driving to walking commutes?
It would be nice if that were a dilemma that arose! Instead, at least around here, it's a question of preserving glades at the expense of shitty condos for rich people in the middle of working-class neighborhoods that've been established for decades and have no desire to be overshadowed - literally; the latest specimen is a collection of four-story buildings in a neighborhood of single-story houses - because some assholes with a taste for slumming decided to make a lifestyle out of it. And thank God for erosion! Because without it, there'd be "picturesque new luxury homes starting in the low 400s" right down to the banks of every river, stream, creek, and rivulet of drunken piss for five miles in every direction.
All animadversion aside, though, your suggestion of "a few hundred people [switching] from driving to walking commutes", merely upon the erection of a new highrise with good transit access, strikes me as idealistic unto sheer fantasy, at least in the context of current United States culture. I switched back to transit myself a year and a half ago, and remain very glad that I did - but it's not something that's happening on any kind of scale, nor does this situation seem likely to change soon. Getting to work via public transit and shanks' mare? That's something poor people do - poor people, a few goobers trying to make some kind of political point, and weirdos like me who grew up in nowheresville Mississippi and still sound like it after twenty years on the East Coast, and of whom it's therefore not surprising to see deviant, if harmless, behavior such as taking trains to work and following deer trails just to see where they go.
(Okay, maybe that wasn't quite all animadversion aside, and I fear I more hardly treat those whom I here sidewise describe than is quite properly their due - certainly they mean no harm, and had I not the experience that I do, I'm sure I would share the same sort of attitude I describe. But I'm having a hard time being evenhanded at the moment, because just last weekend I found one of my favorite verges had been torn up for shitty rich people condos to be defecated upon the place where it was, and this being baseball season, I'm getting a constant gutful of people slumming on my goddam trains. I suppose I should apologize for unburdening myself as I seem to have done, but what the hell? Perhaps it will elicit responses more worthwhile than the comment which inspired their origin.)
You're only going to see rich people "slumming it" in transit-oriented density because your backlash keeps the capacity in such places low.
More people living that kind of lifestyle necessarily means filling in open space within cities and building tall buildings that cast shadows. When you successfully conserve open space and protect existing residents from shadow, the rest of us stay out (as you intended), and keep driving around the sprawl we currently live in.
Do you seriously think anyone who moves to New York or San Francisco drives to work? Hell no! It would cost $1000/mo in parking alone, which would be idiotic when your home and work are connected by a few blocks or a few subway stops.
Reducing driving requires shifting the population onto land that's already occupied. There's no shortage of will to do this: that much is obvious from the market-rate rents in such places. There's a shortage of will to permit it. Everyone you successfully prevent from ruining your city's aesthetics goes on to ruin the world by staying in a place that's built around, and requires, driving everywhere all the time.
How are you simultaneously upset that rich people think public transit is beneath them, and upset that rich people are adopting transit-oriented lifestyles?
These developments aren't close enough to transit to entice its use - a mile, more or less, which is nothing to me but quite a bit to many. And they're not close to the kinds of jobs that you need to have in order to afford most of a half million in mortgage paper. So the built-in two-car garages will see heavy use, because the eventual inhabitants of these eyesores will drive everywhere, and one more piece of land that's been de facto commons for decades will belong to people who contribute nothing to the communities they parasitize, but for example think nothing of installing ultra-bright motion-sensing lights, at what for everyone else in eyeshot is bedroom-window level, because they harbor an unreasoning and unreasonable fear of their surroundings. And because this neighborhood is white and working class, rather than black and poor, no one will even pretend to give a damn. (Not that anyone who matters gives a damn when rich people ruin a poor black neighborhood, either. But it's fashionable in that case to pretend.)
If we were talking about downtown, or even about someplace that's within what people who do not enjoy walking for its own sake might regard as reasonable walking distance of transit, then I'd have to concede the point. But we aren't. And even if we were - those more monied types who do live near transit mostly won't use it except maybe for sporting events, which they regard as half not having to fight for parking, and half safari trip - an occasional convenience, or an exotic indulgence, rather than a commonplace worthy of investment. What do you see any of this solving?
Okay, I'll concede you're talking about a different kind of area than I thought.
> And even if we were - those more monied types who do live near transit mostly won't use it except maybe for sporting events
I don't know if you count tech workers as "monied types," but we are a huge component of the urbanization and gentrification of the Bay Area, and this absolutely isn't true for us. If anyone in my office drives to work, they hide it well. Walking is a little higher status than transit, but almost everyone uses transit.
I live in one of those new 5-story mixed-use mid-rises that everyone loves to hate, with rents that do seem to signal "monied types." In fact my neighbors are mostly young families, students, and few single yuppies like me. People with ordinary incomes absolutely live here, just with more adults per household than they'd probably like. Most of us have cars, but the garage is completely packed at noon on a weekday. They come out almost exclusively on the weekends, particularly when it's nice outside.
The actual tophat-and-monocole owner-of-land-and-means-of-production capitalists are content in their $2m single family homes, but those are authentic neighborhood character and not problematic symbols of wealth at all. The public discourse has no problem with them, but it would be political suicide to come out in favor of housing for mere high wage workers. Only the destitute (who qualify for BMR) and the oligarchy (who can afford neighborhood-character-respecting single family houses) are welcome here.
Huh. I could've sworn that at some point in this thread I had mentioned I live in Baltimore, but apparently this is not the case; no wonder we've been talking past one another. I have no idea what problems the Bay Area has, but it sounds like they're not closely similar to anything I describe.
In a prior comment in this thread, I mentioned a verge about which I later had more to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14666944 - tl;dr: the plot went for a song, the developer's going to make a killing, and neither the city nor its populace is going to see any meaningful part of that killing - but, this being the city it is, I'm sure whoever sold the developer a sweetheart deal will get a tidy little kickback out of it.
It's not an either-or situation. The apartment building can have many large, fast-growing deciduous (ideally fruit-bearing) trees planted on their sunny side.
And trees can make a big difference -- just think about the temperature drop when you step into a dense forest from an open meadow.
> We need a new 'Manhattan project' to find and enforce a solution.
No, we don't. Large-scale geoengineering proposals have already been made and they are like <$1B each. Many have been calculated to reduce global average temperature by multiple degrees for hundreds of years. It's completely ridiculous that everyone is still complaining about climate change. $1B is significantly less than the total cost spent worrying about these things so far, not to mention the cost of actual damage already incurred and predicted to occur.
If you're going to make staggering, sweeping claims, it would be nice of you to do more than link two Wikipedia articles with a bunch of undifferentiated stuff in them. How about some detailed examples of why this is so not-a-big-deal? Show some work?
>Large-scale geoengineering proposals have already been made and they are like <$1B each. Many have been calculated to reduce global average temperature by multiple degrees for hundreds of years.
So far cheaper to operate is correlated with smaller/lighter cars. The lower safety ratings of these small cars in offset crashes suggests that owners of these cars are taking a greater risk on the road.
Most people overestimate the value of this deduction. If you are married filing jointly you would get a $12600 without itemizing. So you are only saving any money if your mortgage interest and property taxes are more than $12600 a year, or if you have other deductions.
"Over the last month or so, the spinning toys have gone from an elementary-school fad to a nationwide obsession. Unlike many other toy crazes, fidget spinners offer a wild-wild west for global capitalists looking to cash in on the craze. For one, there are no patents or trademarks to worry about infringing, so any factory can spew them out by the thousands. They're cheap to make and buy, so there's little risk in investing in, say, 500 or 1,000 of them. And unlike hoverboards, the craze that Chinese factories were cranking out last year, they aren't going to explode or catch fire.
"I'm selling a couple thousand a week just walking around and asking stores if they them""
This looks like a product where some investor will end up with a few dozen railway cars full of unsaleable fidget spinners when the excitement dies down.
Some VCs I know had a similar problem with garden gnomes a few years back. They used a few for office decorations and probably buried the rest.
Can confirm. I just received 100 I ordered from Alibaba at $1.60 each. My kids are selling them to friends and people in the neighborhood for $5-7 each. They're going quick.
Hadn't thought about wholesaling to gas stations. Maybe we'll try that.
