I used to think this too, but e.g. Bosch and IKEA have great replacement parts websites accessible to the consumer. IKEA’s parts are mostly free, too! With modern logistics (automated warehouses, cheap shipping, ordering online) it is actually a solvable problem, if the company gives a damn about it.
I'll take that as a recommendation, thank you! Fwiw, i have found spares for many brands by searching model numbers and wading through spate parts aggregators. The market exists. It's often uneconomic :-(
Rethinking is indeed written for people who have some or even a lot of existing proficiency in statistics, but for whom it never really clicked. If that’s not your background, I can understand that it might feel disjointed.
+ Krushke’s Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, and for the very basics there is Downey’s Think Bayes. I guess there might be a gap in the literature for a different approach, heck, I’d read it, but there is some very good material already out there.
That was a good read, thanks! I think one thing the blog post perhaps misses is that although humans are nice throughout the movie, we are supposed to view a lot of their best behavior near the end as part of their "awakening", the realization that there is more to life than just pleasure and that it'd be great to get to live on earth again. It's not as incoherent as it seems, though there is definitely still room to wonder whether the protagonists are actually the villains.
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.
I think you're making my point though, all of those connections required "knowing a guy", and the odds that for all the problems you might need expertise for, you won't know enough guys.
And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.
For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.
People’s tastes in beer and wine vary so dramatically (and there are so many styles) that it’s not clear to me that you can actually have a “best of.”
The beer and wine I enjoy the best my wife finds completely unpalatable. For wine, I enjoy a dry Grenache; Mas de Gourgonnier is a good one. For beer, I enjoy a beer with body, a malty profile, and balanced hops; there are many mass-produced styles that fit this, but I like Sam Smith Organic Lager, and Leffe Brune. I’ve also brewed many beers myself and one of my all-time favorites was an all-grain formulation of a honey ale [1].
Such is the nature of beer and wine (and HN) that someone is going to “disagree” with me. That’s fine. Just go try some things and see what you like.
One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)
Yeah, I agree with this. Though, I think you could make bikes for much cheaper with some ingenuity. Certainly some bike-powered appliances.
Also I think OLPC was a misguided project, as most of these things are. Its out of stem with maslows hierarchy of needs. Folks who are subsistence farmers with drought, smoke filled homes and stomach parasites don't need a laptop and academic education. They need practical and actionable tools and techniques to better meet their basic needs, a state from which they could better pursue academics etc
Yes, ggplot2 is lovely to work with for complex graphs. Whereas a classic plotting library will have one function to create a bar graph, another to create a line graph, etc., in ggplot instead you can stack layers, each with different properties, variables, shapes, data-dependent colors, scales, whatever you want. It also makes it easy to create grids of similar graphs.
OTOH, motion sickness is often called "car sickness" for a reason, people who suffer from it only sometimes suffer on a bus, and rarely if ever on a train or a plane, so I'm not sure I would agree that "all transportation and tourism related businesses" are impacted. Also, doesn't dimenhydrinate work for your wife or kids?
I experience motion sickness more easily on planes than on trains or buses. Boats are a problem too, in heavy seas.
In a large plane with no or very light turbulence the motion sickness doesn't brake through, it's only an uneasy feeling. In heavier turbulence, or in things like a small Cessna or a sailplane it gets worse. I haven't had to vomit in these situations since I was a little kid, but I do feel bad from nausea.
Funnily enough, I don't get seasick in heavy seas - even below deck without a horizon - but I will sitting at the dock with light motion. It's like my vestibular system "knows" to shut up when the chaotic motion goes beyond certain parameters.
Nausea is from Latin "seasickness", known for thousands years.
From my experience bus was the worst as you can't get front seat, even worse were backward positioned seats. Train and plane were great. Car in the middle, depend on road and driving style.
If I was on bus during childhood you would know by stops it made. We avoided that by traveling by car.
Yeah, my wife and I were on a cruise once that was going through some VERY rough waters, and the swaying of the ship was making us sick. We took dimenhydrinate and it put us to sleep right after breakfast and we slept until like 5 PM. Lost an entire day.
There's a non-drowsy anti-sickness formula out now called meclizine, but I found it to be less effective.
reply