Chicago had the reverse experience. The main shopping street (State Street) was turned into a pedestrian mall and it essentially destroyed the city center. State Street wasn't an important traffic route (Michigan Avenue is a far larger and more important north/south street and only a few blocks away) but something about the lack of traffic made the area feel like a bad suburban mall rather than a vital part of the city. The major retail outlets eventually failed (part of this was due to larger trends in retailing, but accelerated along this street) and the whole area became filled with cheap tchotchke shops, empty storefronts and the homeless.

In the early 2000s, the second Mayor Daley decided to revert it back into a standard street. The street almost immediately revived. Again, there were some other trends helping with this (a push to have more people living in the Loop, redevelopment of an empty lot) but much of it was simply due to returning the "dynamism" of a street that had car traffic. State Street is once again a major shopping and dining destination and it has also revitalized several of the streets around it.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they are generally at or lower than typical supermarket prices. And everything is butchered to order - if you want your breasts butterflied or turned into cutlets, chickens trussed or spatchcocked, whole leg quarters or separated into parts, or just want a bag of backbones for stock, it's all included in the price.

Their retail, non-bulk, price for leg quarters is about $2/lb. Between the cost of Ziplocks and freezing, I don't think you'd be spending a whole lot more if you just picked it up fresh once or twice a week. And this is high-quality, hand-trimmed meat, not the kind of bulk processed stuff you're going to find at Walmart.

Jeez, I see you have an AC stalker following you around. Sorry about that.

You let your cats get too specific when they were kittens.

If you feed your cats high quality kibble from kittenhood, they will not get finicky later. I've raised over 30 cats over 50+ years and not a one of them became a finicky eater. We had one develop an allergy that required him to switch to a restricted ingredient kibble, but he switched over just fine.

Cats are not naturally weird, finicky, anti-social animals. If you simply interact with them in much the same way you would with a dog early on (pick them up, bother them when they're eating, add some noise to their environment, give them consistent food and attention), they will be quite pleasant, friendly little animals. But they will get squirrely on you if you treat them with kid gloves as kittens and feed into their nutty side by catering to their every whim. My aunt was super quiet and fed hers "special" food and they were neurotic as all get out.

Of course, once you've got weirdos, there's not much you can do (we inherited a weirdo once) to change things quickly. But if you stay consistent, you can ease them out of some of their skittishness. They'll never be "normal" but they can still be good pets.

I first noticed what is now called "woody breast" about 7 years ago, but about 2 years ago it got some prevalent that I stopped eating chicken for a while. I eventually found a local farm producer that raises their chickens humanely and doesn't use the super-growing varieties. The cost is not significantly more than factory farmed chicken, it's better for the birds and the quality is night and day better. Plus, they butcher the birds to order - you can get backs and necks for stock for pennies and those birds were happily pecking away earlier that morning.

I listened to a podcast and did a little research on the subject and they're really stumped. The problem is that it's not unique to the fast-growing breeds - it occurs fairly regularly in the original stock too, so doing some cross-breeding to clear out the problem won't work. They have some new gizmo that can detect woody breast without contact (some difference in conductivity of sound?), which they're looking to bring online while they search for the genetic, environmental or husbandry basis of the condition. Right now, they have the processors feel the meat and redirect anything that feels hinky to the chicken nugget stream. (Apparently, the meat itself is fine, and the textural differences are obliterated by grinding.)

I suspect that there is some genetic component that has now become concentrated in the breed stock, because there is way more of it today than even a few years ago. Thank god for my local farmer!

That used to be true, but tech sites have become increasingly progressive / statist / liberal (choose your moniker). Ars' commentariate can be downright Marxist.

You might notice that the GP is currently sitting at +5 informative and that most of the upvoted comments on this article are left-leaning. Hell, you are at +2 Informative as "we aren't liberal enough" AC. Slashdot's cadre of old-school libertarians is fading fast.

Those are some old tests. Firefox 59 (the "current") was released nearly a year ago and is six releases behind.

Now, I have no idea if Firefox has been working on HTML5 compliance in the year since, but I think it's probably fair to say that most of the energy of the organization 2017/early 2018 was on Quantum (FF 57) and cleaning up issues around that release.

Duty is not antagonistic to morality - duty is a form of morality. Maybe this grandmaster should read up on moral foundations theory. It's clear that Bengio is more focused on the care/harm pillar but it's not the only pillar.

People rarely disagree on the pillars of morality (care is better than harm, fairness is better than cheating, loyalty is better than betrayal, respect is better than contempt, cleanliness is better than filth), they just value them differently or apply them to different categories (e.g., loyalty to humanity rather than nation, respect for institutions rather than individuals, protection from harm rather than compassionate aid, etc.).

Many member of the military are going to value loyalty, respect, and protection from harm at a very high level. This does not make them "less moral" than people who place a higher value on fairness and proactive care. Having a military that values the former and hospital staff the values the latter is a good thing - a hospital staff that revolts against their superiors (because they value care over order) might be good. It's significantly less good in a military.

You actually can't copyright recipes in the United States. The only thing you can copyright is the text surrounding the recipe.

Then you'll really like it when you read the book Consilience by E.O. Wilson, who popularized the term. Great book.

Am I the only one old enough to remember that we did exactly that in the US until the mid-70s? Every soda bottle had a hefty deposit (usually half the cost of the soda itself) which made it routine to return bottles to get your deposit back (or, more typically, to get the next 8-pack of bottles). The bottles were returned to the bottler, washed, sterilized and reused. Chipped or damaged bottles were recycled or trashed. There was an entire system built around this - bottlers, drivers, supermarkets all coordinating the reuse of those bottles.

Eventually the economics and convenience of aluminum cans (and, later, plastic bottles) took over. The savings in purchasing and shipping costs just completely wiped out that industry.

I'd be fine going back to the old model but I suspect most people wouldn't.

I have no idea how the iOS 12 parental controls are implemented (my youngest is 14 and moving out of the age where I'm all that concerned about his web browsing - which mainly seems to consist of schoolwork and Twitch streams of Plants vs Zombies), but it really should be implemented in terms of frameworks.

It's fine if Apple implements a "default" implementation of that framework but in the end they shouldn't want to be in the business of deciding what's appropriate or inappropriate. Rather, create a store where parents can subscribe to various filter feeds (similar to Adblock/uBlock) and let them choose what's appropriate. Some parents are going to be OK with sex ed and horrified by gun instruction and vice versa - no need to jump into that cultural minefield.

Why any company would want to be seen as a gatekeeper in beyond me. There are plenty of organizations and groups that are happy to fill that niche - and by giving users choice, you remove yourself from the culture wars. Unless, of course, that's your goal - but that seems like a bad business decision.

This was discussed on the Freakonomics podcast several years ago - In Praise of Maintenance. He had been doing a series on innovation and then did a counterpoint on how maybe maintenance was as much if not more important than innovation. It's a good podcast and goes into more detail than the short Economist piece.

They are lousy for mosquito control, however. Researchers have analyzed bat stomach contents and mosquitoes are basically nothing - bats like bigger insects (like moths) or swarming insects (like gnats). Mosquitoes just aren't a good source of calories - too much effort for too few calories.

A bat (or purple martin) aren't going to turn down a mosquito if it happens to be in its flight path, but they aren't actively predating them either. The only really effective mosquitovore are mosquitofish, which eat larvae.

If it was cheaper in dollars, no plastic would be produced from virgin hydrocarbons. In fact, plastic from recycling is significantly more expensive than producing it from natural gas byproducts.

It would be fantastic is plastic recycling was actually economic, but it's not, really. Even high "recycling" countries like Sweden end up burning much of their plastic.