What might make golf more accessible is building smaller 9-hole courses heavy on par-threes with more forgiving hazards and flatter greens. Less of a time commitment, cheaper due to faster turnover... Change the name somewhat (Golf-lite? Softgolf?) so as to defuse objections from people who want to maintain âoepure golfâ(TM)sâ identity as is.

They have those already, generally called executive courses. The one in my neighborhood has 18 holes for $15 (or 9 for $9), will rent you clubs for $3 and a cart for $3.50. It's dead flat and has minimal hazards - just enough so you know what a hazard is.

If you are going to play with other people you know, you can share clubs while trying things out.

Most courses - even municipal public courses - won't allow you to do that as it slows your group down considerably. If you've got a rookie in your group, you're already going to be a bottleneck. Don't make it worse by having to chase back and forth sharing clubs.

Most places are more than happy to rent you clubs for the round at pretty reasonable rates. The nearby executive course is $3 for clubs and $9 for 9 holes.

I take all interested newbies there for an introduction to the sport. It's dead flat, nothing but par 3, no reservations, and chock full of duffers so nobody feels bad. For $20, you get a round in the sun plus a couple of beers.

I'm sure there's someplace similar to this in every city. Not everything is Bushwood Country Club.

My reaction when Google buys something is, "Ewww, now Google will know how I [whatever]." Example: I had been strongly considering a Nest thermostat, but there is NO WAY I want Google to have heuristic information about the goings-on in my house.

Yes, there is definitely a divide between the most ideal definition of Libertarian and the more common implementation. You're clearly a thinker, and I'd trust proposals made by you to be worthy of debate.

Most of the folks I've met who claim to be Libertarian are either more of the greedy sort, or are at least ideological purists, even to their own detriment. To go back to the garbage example, there are self-proclaimed Libertarians I've spoken with who would rather buy their own can and haul their own trash at a cost of X (plus their time) than be "forced" to be complicit with a government program for hauling trash, even though it only costs .5*X.

Even if the goals are lofty, idealogical purism is typically more destructive than not. See RMS for a fine example.

Oh, and their back-up plan, had they not won that debate, was to push for full privatization of the garbage system, i.e. 5 or 6 private companies running trucks every week, crisscrossing each others' routes. Wonderful.

You make a good point, but I'm not sure we're quite to a place where remote-piloted garbage trucks will be considered safe, except maybe in the dead of night when there's few other vehicles on the road.

Even then, though, in my locality, they don't force everyone to use a uniform (i.e. easily lifted by a robotic arm) garbage can. There's a strong libertarian bent in Oregon, so forcing everyone to pay $2/month or buy outright the type of can that'll interface with the truck isn't going to happen. As a result, probably 2/3 of my neighborhood uses their own, cheap cylinder cans, requiring that the garbage guy gets out and lifts.

It's my understanding that the garbage utility wanted to simply give everyone the cans and bury the cost because of the savings through efficiency. However, that was greeted with scorn; people who, on principle, didn't want to pay for other people's cans nor be forced to pay for their own, rallied to ensure that they would continue to be allowed to use whatever can they wanted, damn the cost to everyone else.

LOL, I hope we've never had an argument before, because I think this is awesome. Absolutely the best /. post I've read all day.

Let's stop glorifying the AC.

If you look at places like San Francisco and the way wealth is pooling there, it's easy to understand why traffic congestion is growing faster than the economy.

If you put a bunch of rich-ass people together in one highly-concentrated place, even if all of them are working from home or taking Google busses to work, they're going to need services. Grocery stores, plumbers, babysitters, teachers, restaurant workers, you name it. Many of those sorts of jobs are not ones which are compatible with telecommuting--if my garbage man starts working from home, I'm going to be pissed!--and most of them are not of an income level which would allow a comfortable residence within the city where the job is. If you're making $30,000 a year as a teacher, spending $2,000 a month on a 400 sq ft studio apartment so you can walk or bike to work doesn't leave much left over for food and the like.

So inevitably, thousands upon thousands of workers need to commute various distances to keep their jobs and live in some level of comfort.

I realize that SF, as a peninsula, is a fairly unique scenario: it provides a high-value destination with severely constrained access points. Maybe not the actual logical conclusion of all similar circumstances, but a useful indicator of how things might play out in areas where money is aggregated into smaller and smaller groups who then take over relatively small and very desirable locations.

I think I literally couldn't manage without ssh. I always install tmux and vim on any machine I use, if they aren't already there. One of the varieties of KeePass is also mandatory for me.

--- SER