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Comment Re:That's rather disappointing, but they had acces (Score 1) 38

Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

Comment Re:Look and feel (Score 1) 117

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Comment Re:Fair weather friends (Score 1) 58

They also get in the way of building homes.

For a while (no idea about current situation) but where I used to live in the UK you could not build a property because the Environment Agency had enacted new rules which capped water run off into watercourses, and no council anywhere in the UK had manageable plans to actually meet it with new developments, so nothing got built.

The rules were well intentioned, but came down like a hammer and stopped everything.

Comment Re:Fair weather friends (Score 5, Insightful) 58

Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.

If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.

Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.

Comment Re:Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score 1) 94

Google however was the first to make a bunch of open-source fonts.

What about SIL? They released a few fonts for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic under the SIL Open Font License before Google Fonts existed - and, in fact, Google uses their licence for some fonts.

Comment Re: Did the city of SF... (Score 1) 143

If San Francisco is operating under laws similar to other states, they already have the power to tax snacks. It is typically not very popular and causes enough backlash that a city trying it often gives up or scales back their snack tax plans. Suing these companies puts the industry on notice that they should improve their practices, even if the city is unlikely to succeed. I'm not a lawyer but I don't think their odds are good, interstate commerce doctrine probably applies.

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