> in Texas, where, from what I understand, if you catch someone in the night stealing you could just kill them even if they never threatend you.
It's worth pointing out that night is doing some of the work in this statement. Texas is unusual, as far as I know, that darkness makes a big difference in how self-defense and danger are viewed. It kinda makes sense, because in the dark, the would-be victim is less able to fully and accurately assess the situation. So Texans need to be aware that their actions may be interpreted more harshly in the dark.
Infeasible for a government would mean it is sufficiently expensive that it is not politically popular to spend that much money on public bathrooms.
Also, Buc-ees does not offer free bathrooms in urban, dense areas with higher proportions of mentally ill and drug addicted populations, so that comparison makes no sense.
I used Buc-ee's as an example because they're famous for their clean bathrooms. But there certainly exist clean bathrooms in urban areas. I'd venture to say that those aren't all in high-end establishments that exclude any "riff-raff". It's possible to find clean toilets in urban McDonald's or Wal-Mart; maybe not all of them, but certainly not none either.
And regarding expense on public bathrooms:
* San Francisco spent $1.7M on a single toilet
* Seattle spend $5 installing 5 toilets.
* NYC's public restrooms routinely cost $2M-$4M
Now, those are building projects rather than ongoing operations. But it shows that governments are willing to spend absurd amounts on toilets.
I don't know exactly what the problem is, but there's something about government (mis)management in the issue.
Sure, but why is it that government-run institutions are (we're being told in this thread) uniquely vulnerable to the problem? Why isn't it happening at Buc-ee's or at McDonald's in the same degree?
A large proportion of degrees awarded today are not useful for any practical application.
But having a degree of some kind still serves as a signaling mechanism, demonstrating lots of things including the ability to "play the game". to follow instructions, and so forth.
If I were 18 I'd be sceptical about the value of degrees compared to the value of trades.
Yes degrees are a prerequisite for white collar jobs but if there is competition for ever fewer white collar jobs that's a life gamble perhaps not worth taking unless you are supremely confident in your abilities in a field.
If we're being honest, the value of a degree has been in decline for a long time. It was only being held up by STEM and even that is on shaky ground now. The days when an e.g. English degree would open doors are long over.
There's going to be a huge realignment in white collar work in the next decade or two, and then there's the fact that college degrees themselves (except for maybe STEM), are becoming less and less valuable because higher education is so politicized and taken over by nonsense. My college education (Computer Science, 1987) served me very well over my career, but I don't know what I'd be doing if I were 18 now.
I agree somewhat, but for the most part the signal is that you can succeed in some kind of knowledge work. If AI replaces ~all knowledge work, that signal isn't actually going to be valuable I think. While I don't find it certain that AI will do that, it seems increasingly plausible with every model release. In that world, I don't think very many people are pursuing degrees.
I never understood why being able to “play the game” is considered a positive signal. Getting a degree is the safe path, it doesn’t require any risk taking, and not much initiative. It’s about having the money (or going into debt for most people) and sitting your ass in a chair until you’re told you’re worthy. That idea is repulsive to me.
Last week they released a change that put the header Strict-Transport-Security into all responses (yes, even non-HTTPS ones!). This broke not just BookOrbit, but every other app I had running on that server, because suddenly everything being served by that host refused to work without HTTPS.
I probably should have done it sooner, but I spent a big chunk of the afternoon setting up new DNS entries so I can access each app through a different hostname. That was easy enough for me, running OPNsense with my own internal DNS, but you may not have that much flexibility in your home.
I submitted an issue (see https://github.com/bookorbit/bookorbit/issues/760) and a few days later, they created a semi-fix such that the header is only sent out in secure responses. But this still has the effect of forcing every app on that server to require HTTPS.
Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats
I discovered BookOrbit about two months ago. I think that it, together with the KOReader plugin that exposes the remote BO UI, may turn out to be a game changer in how I organize and access my ebook repository.
Same here, I jailbroke my kindle just 1-2 months ago (when the PW5 JB came out) and I had been using BookOrbit for only a few weeks before then. Since then I've read over 15 books and been loving BookOrbit and KOReader.
I jailbroke my Kindle and moved to KOReader last year, primarily to get away from the Amazon jail. Just the bare KOReader UX was pretty utilitarian. It lacked polish for sure. I'll have to agree that, as noted elsewhere, the KOReader menus can be difficult to get a grip on.
If you're working at just the most basic level of functionality, I don't think KOReader is necessarily worse than native Kindle. The latter is hampered by being very opinionated about how you should experience it, and that includes pushing their store above the user's own library, and this is a real annoyance.
As you start to demand more capabilities they diverge more. Organizing when you've got many books on the device is clunky on both platforms, but in different ways. The native Kindle options for grouping are simple, but not necessarily easy. They're very generic, and very cumbersome to work with. Bare KOReader's support for folders makes more sense to me, and it's easier to deal with bulk books than is Kindle's.
Getting books onto Kindle is super-easy if you get them from Amazon, but complexity ramps up for other sources. Your best bet is plugging it into USB and transferring via the file system. Native KOReader add to this an OPDS capability (if your book repository supports it), which works but is less than pleasant. If you use BookOrbit as your repository, there's a plugin that gives you the remote BookOrbit UI from the Kindle, which makes things a LOT better.
I experimented with Simply UI for a bit but could never get it to work quite right. About a month ago I found Bookshelf, and this makes the UX pretty wonderful. It has a very attractive and intuitive UI. And it simplifies the interactions needed for group management a bit.
Bottom line is that KOReader + Bookshelf are, for at least a power user, a potentially far superior experience compared to baseline Kindle.
I've tried hard to make Bookshelf work for me, but I find the UI confusing, going off in unexpected directions, and it's very unintuitive. I've got SimpleUI at the moment and it's comfortable, even though the library interface is lacking.
Because most of the page is dark, with light only coming from the text, the total light emitted is much less. That makes it less annoying to my wife, when I'm reading before going to sleep.
this is the worst kind of pedantic engineer comment that seems to infest this site. they're obviously talking about the frontlight. dark mode reflects much much less light back at the user through the lightguide because the dark bg absorbs more of the light.
It wasn't obvious. My thought process was that they were equating ereaders with eink displays, and they had a non-eink ereader. To me, emitting light and reflecting light are completely different.
(I suppose I'm not supposed to feel complimented by the term 'engineer'? I'm not trained/experienced in any engineering discipline, not even software engineering.)
If you want pedantic ridiculousness, well, notice that I never said that the e-ink emits light. It does, however reflect light back from the device's frontlight. The device taken as a system most certainly emits light, but less so when in dark mode.
It's worth pointing out that night is doing some of the work in this statement. Texas is unusual, as far as I know, that darkness makes a big difference in how self-defense and danger are viewed. It kinda makes sense, because in the dark, the would-be victim is less able to fully and accurately assess the situation. So Texans need to be aware that their actions may be interpreted more harshly in the dark.
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