Ignoring the obvious contradictory nature of the post (a trip to a place that is generally so expensive and time consuming that only the wealthy leisure class can access it yields polite people), what is the alternative to the fast news cycle?

I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscription?

How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?

I switched to a weekly subscription of Economist (print) and it has been great. I haven't seen then news in a year (on phone, or TV). If there's something really important happening, then people around me generally tell me. At that point I check what's happening online, but that doesn't last more than a day or 2.

It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.

Isn’t The Economist a super “rich guy” perspective though?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard very good things about the publication’s quality and it’s admirable that it’s a weekly print.

I’d almost rather just read nothing over filtering down to a single perspective that is that specialized. Feels a little like getting all your news through Planet Money. Sure you’ll know what’s going on but through a single lens.

The Economist and the Spectator etc are all part of the same club.

I'd rather read a magazine which didn't have the same stories in it.

The only problem I have with escaping the news cycle is relying on other people for important information. "Today is shorts and t-shirt, tomorrow is freezing rain" has caught me by surprise. So I find myself following the weather more than I would if I were watching local news. But it's not just weather.

Regardless. It's good to feel disconnected from these things. But at the same time I recognize I have a responsibility to take care of the things within my reach.

Is this what people were doing in 1939 though? I really hope not.

You can check the weather by looking at the sky. I'm amazed at how many people can't do this. You can get an idea of what will happen for the next day or so. (Although if you are out on open water, always be prepared for bursts of bad weather).

Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.

Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.

For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).

My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?

you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?

The news isn't even the news.

If you haven’t already, read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and then feel good about disconnecting from the outrage machine.

I get the Sunday paper and that’s most of the news (other than weather) that I ever see. The best part is the crossword that I do with my wife.

tl;dr - Heather Cox Richardson!

My original mini-essay (heh):

It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:

- turn on grayscale - don't use any social media - turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)

The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.

As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.

But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.

Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.

One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..

I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.

Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...

Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.

My immediate thought is at what point does desalination tech + clean energy reach the crossover where building a 60 mile tunnel over 60 years not make sense?

It feels like very soon, and coastal cities can stop relying on hinterland reservoirs for water.

Probably never. The tunnels cost a lot to build but, once built run almost for free - they're powered by gravity and will keep running for close to a century before major maintained is needed.

Yeah that makes sense but if growth dictates another tunnel... And it takes another 60 years, your capital expense starts to look a lot like an operating expense. Not to mention one of the big stated purposes of this tunnel is actually to facilitate maintenance of the other tunnels. There is probably more operation cost hidden here than seems obvious.

The big reason for tunnel 3 isn't new population growth, it's so that the other tunnels can be shut down for maintenance and inspection. NYC's population is more or less stable over the last 90 years.

Close to a century?

There are Roman aqueducts in continuous operation for two millenia.

AFAIK there is one still in operation and entirely for tourist purposes

Today as in Ancient Rome the aqueduct terminates at fountains. It does not connect to the standard modern municipal plumbing. Whether that counts as being operated for "tourist purposes" is a matter of definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqua_Vergine

Capital vs operating is a big factor here. The tunnels operations & maintenance cost is probably far lower than a desalinization plant that could produce an equivalent volume of potable water.

Desalination will be a West Coast thing. The East Coast has abundant fresh water.

> Desalination will be a West Coast thing. The East Coast has abundant fresh water.

It's not entirely accurate to say that the West Coast doesn't have enough fresh water. Oregon and Washington have a lot of rain, and many groundwater resources.

California kneecaps itself with perpetual deeded water rights and mismanagement/closure/lack of improvement to reservoirs and related infrastructure. There's a long history of this kind of stuff in the state (see the watering LA desert, the Salton Sea experiment, and many others).

It’s probably more likely AI will become sentient and kill us than it is desalination and clean energy are cheaper than this.

This was only a 60 year project because of politics.

Here's a quote I got for a solar install in the Philippines this week:

51.2v 314ah cells (15kwh battery) 16x 580-590w solar panel

Installed for 310k PHP = $5,275

I've also specced out 15-16kwh batteries using the Yxiang design for around the price of your Solix. The problem in the US is regulatory and a particularly predatory tradesman market at the moment.

Is that "regulatory" the problem or is it the solution? We'll know more 20 years from now, looking back at fire incident statistics.

(yes, I'm leaving it open if regulation makes a difference or not - for all we know it could even make a negative difference, helping companies that are better at regulation than at safety. But if I had to bet, I know where my money would be)

The problem is lack of information at time of purchase, in both cases. It's so onerous to figure out what these products are doing that people give up. Same in the airline case. If any of the airlines actually provided better service at a higher price, they'd have a market, but it's impossible to assess that as an end user with all the fake review bullshit that's all over the Internet these days.

The only cases where it's clearcut are a few overseas airlines like Singapore Airline who have such a rock solid reputation for great service that people will book them even if the price is 2x.

It's pretty easy to blame the litigant here. Without one, the courses would still be up.

I mean I just participated in a Next JS incident that required it this week.

It has been rare over the years but I suspect it's getting less rare as supply chain attacks become more sophisticated (hiding their attack more carefully than at present and waiting longer to spring it).

NextJS was just bog standard “we designed an insecure API and now everyone can do RCE” though.

Everyone has been able to exploit that for ages. It only became a problem when it was discovered and publicised.

Now someone tell me the equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and I'll check it out. Wodehouse feels like the lighthearted successor of Austen, focused more on the comedy and farcical plots, than serious romance. Funny enough, I started reading his stuff on the recommendation of Paul Graham.

I can't speak to Wodehouse's style, but as far as mecha series that weave comedy into plots that are fairly serious but also genre-aware (and ready and willing to take the piss out of them), in a well-constructed setting, I would look at Martian Successor Nadesico for old-school, Majestic Prince for a newer series.

Pretty simple really, we're basically all [1] addicted to smartphones, so we basically all [1] advocated for this. After all, to admit it was a problem for our kids, we'd have to also admit it could be a problem for ourselves.

Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.

[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception

What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.

When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.

While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.

As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.

HA I think I still have dope wars on my old college TI-84. Thanks for the blast of nostalgia!

Came to comment “Ours were banned because we wrote scripts to show ‘MEMORY CLEARED’ before exams, and played Pokémon on the motherfucker”.

Yeah I used to finish my job on a computer and go use another computer for fun. The smart phone is just a smaller one of tbose.

Did we ever allow the students to smoke in the classroom?

We allowed it in designated areas outside the classroom between classes…

My school even had a gazebo on the school yard so smokers didn't have to stand in the rain. They literally spent money to accommodate smokers.

Of course by the time I was there smoking on school grounds was prohibited, so smokers had to go just beyond the gate. Which students were not allowed to, but few teachers were willing to enforce that

In the 1970s some "Vocational" High Schools allowed it (if the students were past the legal age).

We allowed teachers to smoke in the classroom, so in some sense..

Teacher gets the lion’s share of the nicotine, kids get all of the rest, essentially.

Raw deal.

In the classroom not, but during my youth in Germany, the smokers had their own smoker's corner with an ashtray until smoking age was raised from 16 to 18 and the smokers had to go out of the schoolyard (i.e. they had to walk 5 meters more, lol).

In the class room? No. But students could smoke during breaks at the schoolyard.

Funny that we as a society were winning for a while until somebody invented vapes.

Both honestly. For the guy who wrote it, it was comedy. But people do live like this. It just doesn't usually end all that well for them.

I think that's the deliniation between a hobby and an addiction.

Yes, I don't rebase, I only merge. We squash commits on merge of MR/PR anyway, so there is no value to rebase for us AFAICT. It also removes a ton of gnarly situations you can find yourself in when you mess up a rebase somehow.