> What’s your working environment like? - We’ve recently moved to a more “hip” location. We used to have personal desks, but now we have this “pick whatever spot is avaiable” open area. I dislike it a lot.
Somehow this resonates a lot with me even if though I've never worked on Mainframes or anything like that.
I, too, strongly prefer having a personal desk. It is completely natural for a human to set up his environment according to their tastes and preferences, and I'm baffled that some office designers do not account for that.
Depressing to see how low we've gotten. It's not that people want an office (with a door) to minimize interruptions, you now need to advocate for your own fucking desk?
Because there's a subset of designers and architects who feel that they are uniquely enlightened and brilliant, and their job is to dictate to poor benighted proles how they should live their lives, rather than serve and empower human beings who have their own dignity and agency.
Witness modernist architecture: "you shall all live and work in soulless concrete boxes, because I the brilliant architect have decreed that ornament is superfluous, and I can shape you into Properly Thinking People by manipulating your environment."
A think everyone prefers to have a personal desk but for hybrid (work from home with office days) it can be wasteful and a few days a month I could put up with a random desk. I see no point in forcing people use a random desk when everyone in the office most of the days.
I wonder if most offices are like us, where we have "flexible seating" but everyone has their spot and sits in the same desk whenever their in and most people respect that. So your chair, monitor position and brightness, desk height, etc... are all as you like it. Makes a mockery of the hot desking concept and we'd all much rather they officially abandoned the idea
Its almost as if ChatGPT is getting to be a form of dialogic learning [1]. While ChatGPT is not yet an authoritative source, it should be possible to get to such a future. The problem is with the ethics of it becoming an authoritative source and how it can possibly unlearn (or accept change or challenges). For now, the example OP provides is without authority where they learnt about a topic taking ChatGPT as a peer.
The problem remains since many people don’t know or understand Hindi. Unlike many other countries, there isn’t one single ‘native’ language. English is the only one that currently transcends barriers. Hindi could become that in the future. Other efforts also exist such as to popularize Sanskrit.
It is not much different from Europe with many local languages. People in those countries study in their own native languages. Starting with Hindi in India would be a good start to give local languages more prominence.
Are there other examples of similarly old roads or routes that are still in use today? I know of the Grand Trunk Road [1] and other examples would be cool to learn about.
There are hundreds of roads in what used to be Rome and the Spanish empire, but very few preserve their ancient pavements as eventually they replaced by modern roads or abandoned during longer periods of times. Three examples:
Vía Augusta, from southern Spain up to Rome.
Via claudia Augusta, from Germany to Rome.
El camino Real, in America (Mexico and USA, also 2500km approx)
Sections of the Mullan Road still exist in the US West. It is/was one of the first wagon roads to cross the Rockies. Somewhat old for the New World, anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullan_Road
Not sure what are simple oral traditions, but the Vedas [1] are oral transmitted. To preserve meaning there is elaborate chanting techniques. They have been written down recently, however, to really learn them, one needs to chant. They are pretty complex for sure.
If the Vedas oral tradition "led directly to complex story-telling literature," you may have a fair point, but with only the example of the Vedas having a complex oral tradition, this (as a candidate for counter-example) isn't exactly clear. But I'm almost certain there's tons of complex stories in mine and especially in other cultures of which I am not aware. If there wasn't, maybe I could give you a hand.
Hindu tradition state that it directly led to elaborate literature and rich story telling. Puranas [1] and epics like the Ramayana [2] and Mahabharata [3] were orally transmitted as well. The point being that the Vedas are pretty terse which makes it hard to understand or apply without specialized knowledge / background. The Puranas, Ramayana and Mahabharata provide context via stories etc..
I lived for a couple of years in Amsterdam. Cycled fine in the rain, snow or sunshine. Then again, the infra was amazing and supportive. Can’t speak for the cities you mention though but in Phoenix where I live now, cycling in Summer is impossible.
If you get less than an inch of snow a month and it doesn't stay long enough to go through thawing and freezing cycles, then bike infrastructure can handle it reasonably well. If you get a foot of snow at times and the snow you get in November hasn't melted by March, then bike infrastructure and the safety of riding bikes on segments of road that are difficult to plow, biking in the winter may be more problematic.
I'd suggest a trip up to Minneapolis, Madison, or Chicago in January and consider how bikeable those areas are and if it would be reasonable to do a commute.
(And as an aside, I don't consider those areas to be AI drivable in the winter either)
Deeply freezing temperatures, ice, snow, all of those are completely ridable on bicycles, but you have to ride with very fat tires, often called "fatbikes"[0]. You can ride those bicycles in just about anything; I've ridden them across frozen lakes and up chunks of frozen glacier in the dead of the Alaskan winter, so cold roads don't sound particularly scary. If you want to have a single bike that you can ride in any weather very easily, an electric "fatbike"[1] makes for a super versatile single-person car replacement.
It's worth noting that the nearby city of Tucson is a cycling mecca for pros during the offseason and many avid cyclists continue riding throughout summer. If Phoenix were better designed for the climate it's in (e.g. dense, narrow streets between high thermal mass buildings and lots of shade), the summers would be far less intense.
Interestingly, the PM in a Westminster model is actually more powerful than the President in the US mode. That’s because the PM is part of legislative and executive branch and in theory can get more of their agenda done. In practice, it can vary.
>Interestingly, the PM in a Westminster model is actually more powerful than the President in the US mode. That’s because the PM is part of legislative and executive branch and in theory can get more of their agenda done. In practice, it can vary.
I don't know of any cases among the developed English-speaking countries with Westminster-style governments where your latter sentence is meaningful. The Canadian Prime Minister, especially, is said to be the most powerful single government leader in the world, but really is merely the (to coin a phrase) first among equals among his peers in other countries.
For others' benefit, a Canadian Prime Minister can
* Appoint anyone he wants to cabinet positions
* Appoint anyone he wants to the Supreme Court[1]
* Appoint anyone he wants to ambassadorships and other high positions
* Sign any treaty he wants
* Call an election whenever he thinks he has the best chance of winning more seats than his party possesses in Parliament at the moment
* Get any law passed he wants (assuming that his party has a majority or equivalent thereof), with no meaningful need to deal with an upper house
* Run for reelection as Prime Minister as often as he wants
Most of the above apply to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. The Irish and British upper houses have little power, and New Zealand no longer has an upper house; only Australia has an upper house in the legislature with significant power.
[1] Yes, yes, I know about the convention that the PM names someone from a list of suggestions. That's all that is; a convention. The only actual requirement is that three of the nine justices have to be from Quebec.
> Interestingly, the PM in a Westminster model is actually more powerful than the President in the US mode.
One advantage is that you know who to blame, especially when it elections come around. Instead of the "dead lock" that can occur when both the Legislature and Executive say they have 'mandates' that are opposing to each other.
Somehow this resonates a lot with me even if though I've never worked on Mainframes or anything like that.