> The difference between reading and managing servers is childhood.
That analogy is crap. Is the difference between reading and launching people into space childhood, too? We don't blame authors for kids who can't read any more than you can solve technical illiteracy by bludgeoning software authors. Can we help? Yes, certainly (and check out https://www.cs-first.com/en/home if you haven't). But throwing shade isn't going to magically make an entire class of folks learn something they don't care about.
Not to be overly melodramatic and totally dodging the contents of the article, but aren't we already in a social dystopia? Is there any way of qualifying "how dystopic" a society is?
I wonder how hard it would be to convince folks to drop their expensive setups in favor of nearly $0 static sites, as well as how much up front cost they'd be willing to shovel out for the transition. S3 + CDN (+ Lambdas optionally) feels really ready to me for almost any straightforward "website." For most things GitHub/Lab pages is an easy path to that.
A lot of folks who have static websites aren't technical and invested thousands of dollars for a WP website. If their site already runs, you wouldn't be providing anything.
...unless they have to pay noticeable money for WP hosting due to serious load, or were bitten by security problems.
A free business idea: write a converter from WP to Jekyll (or Hugo) that converts 95% of a typical WP site right, sell total conversion services, maybe reselling hosting, too.
I have several WordPress sites (mostly "abandoned"/no longer updated) that I would love to convert to static sites. I would happily pay a decent sum for a tool that could completely handle that conversion/migration.
I used https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ to convert a WP site with 10.000 pages. Took about 60 minutes so i had to increase PHPs max_execution_time. I also tested some other plugins before but most don't worked for me.
I had to turn off HTTPS for the generation time and reportet it as a bug to the developers.
Teaching kids to code is similar to teaching just about anything else: get them to have fun and find how it applies to them, followed by how to figure out what they don't know, then how to keep going when things are frustrating and they want to give up.
More practically, the kids who are into games have probably already figured out how to write Minecraft mods or something, so introing them to something like Code Combat is a fairly natural next step. For kids into music, try http://sonic-pi.net. Sports? Maybe wade into statistics/data analysis and show em some moneyball or fantasy football. Lego Mindstorms-style stuff is awesome for just about everyone because of the tactile aspect, and moving from that to playing with simple electronics can be done with gentle happy path introductions.
Also be aware of where the falloffs will be. Lots of kids can change the color on a prebuilt object on Khan Academy, but going from changing a field to starting from scratch on a new idea is an incredible. Teaching debugging and figuring out how to solve something you haven't seen before is more important than anything else.
Fun fact: that 600k studio apartment might seem outrageous now, but in 30 years at 6.6% it'll be $4,345,645, and your grandkids will get a nice $16,267,583 500sqft place to hang their hats in 50. Get in while it's good folks.
I've been thinking about 2 as a potential path forward for journalists/journalism. Is there a reason to continue the monolithic paper over directly funding individual journalists?
I think there's a cool idea in a platform designed like this... somewhere in between Kickstarter, Patreon, and NPR, but with a whole bunch of tools for news consumers to discover, read, and support both journalists and stories they're interested in. Things like supporting and discovering topics like "local region politics", "travel", or "technology", while allowing journalists to describe their backgrounds, political leanings, etc, might be a way of addressing trust and transparency in journalism and journalistic leanings while also allowing a range of opinions and perspectives on one platform, rather than being driven solely by editorial control.
I love this idea. I'd honestly be really excited to take it on as some sort of side project. The company/application itself could be an extension of the idea. Open source the whole thing and let the community help improve it while using a patreon-esque model to support the core developers/maintainers.
I think that's pretty clever. Spent 15 min talking about it with coworkers today though, and IMO the challenge with something like this is identifying and specifically addressing the problems it would be trying to solve rather than boiling the ocean and hoping it does the "right thing".
While it's true that criminals, by definition, will break the law, all laws are not treated equally by individuals. Millions of people litter or speed despite the law, but I imagine not all who speed in a car also rob banks. It's my understanding that psychological, social, and legal thresholds are not the same for all people, nor are they binary (there's some really great research into ethics thresholds if someone knows of a link). Sure, adding an additional law might not deter the truly determined, but what about those who have a lower threshold for criminal activity? Why not call all manslaughter murder? Would those who commit suicide with a firearm (half of American suicides [1]) choose a more difficult and less immediate method?
So the question might be, how does changing a law affect those thresholds? Maybe we don't stop determined criminals or mass shootings, but maybe we can make a dent in the more than 20,000 Americans who choose to shoot themselves every year, or make a difference in urban gun violence.
That said, I personally believe that American society is probably too violent and too committed to gun ownership change anytime in my lifetime. We as a society value arguing about gun ownership over actually taking steps to reduce gun violence, or even gathering data on it. The folks that crack me up the most are the ones who say things like you can take my gun from my cold, dead hands because that'd somehow be a check on government power, despite the fact that the federal government possesses tanks and stealth bombers and whatnot. Bonus points if they also think net neutrality is bad, even though open information is demonstrably better for civic checks and balances.
"maybe we can make a dent in the more than 20,000 Americans who choose to shoot themselves every year, or make a difference in urban gun violence."
If those are your goals (and noble goals they are), why not work on health care, notably mental health. If we fixed that, we would probably make an even more substantial dent on the number of suicides, improve the quality of life of those who aren't killing themselves, reduce the amount of urban violence, and even possibly make an impact on mass shootings.
I can certainly understand the compelling societal goal- but I'm a big fan of using the least restrictive (and most effective) means to achieving those goals.
Why not both? Feels like only doing one is like only putting airbags in cars when seat belts are also effective. I don't get why there has to be only one approach to solve societal problems.
Well, I knew someone would eventaully ask this... I should have addressed it in my orginal comment. I kind of hinted at it.
"I'm a big fan of using the least restrictive (and most effective) means to achieving those goals."
That is perhaps the best reason to follow my recommended course. Another reason is simply opportunity cost. Society faces many challenges, and we can't pursue every possible solution to all of them, so it is best to focus first on the best options that are likely to have the greatest impact on the highest priority problems. For the problems noted above, the solution I proposed is more likely in my estimation to have a greater impact, and at a lower cost.
