A better question might be ‘why would anyone stay in Puerto Rico after Maria?’
The Puerto Rican economy has been in terrible shape for years: the economy basically collapsed after the US Congress phased out tax breaks to manufacturers locating in Puerto Rico. Once that happened, the US companies shut down their manufacturing on the island, and in 2006 the full impact hit, with at least 100,00 industrial jobs lost, and innumerable secondary impacts. Then the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and Puerto Rico was hit again.
[Lyman] Stone [US Dept of Agriculture economist] estimates that before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was seeing -2 percent net annual migration: About 1 in every 50 people was leaving every year. The resulting fall in population looks not dissimilar to what happened to Ireland during the 1840s famine.
It’s relatively easy for Puerto Ricans to leave Puerto Rico. As US citizens, they can move anywhere in the country, and with 5.4 million Puerto Ricans in the mainland US, they have lots of friends and family to help them transition off island. And American Airlines has capped one-way fares at $99.
So, of the remaining 3.3 million left on the island, many are predicting 100,000 to 200,000 will leave, perhaps forever.
I think that is way low. My prediction is that over the next two years over a million will depart, and maybe more.
The Commonwealth is broke. The US government doesn’t seem likely to step in and counter the debts that will hobble the region. Why would people stay and shoulder the burden? Maybe they should all depart, and leave the empty island to the creditors.
Our four picks (from left): Espro P3, Bodum Chambord, Bodum Brazil, and Espro P7.
After putting in over 16 hours of research and testing, speaking with several baristas, testing six top contenders in a blind-tasting panel, and making more than 40 cups of coffee, we think the Bodum Chambord is the best French press for most casual coffee drinkers. In our tests, the elegant-looking press brewed coffee that was as grit-free as brews from models that cost up to three times as much. The Chambord is easy to clean and use, and we found that it made balanced, rich coffee with little muddiness.
stephanie vacher@awesome
sometimes at night i'd overhear my parents quietly debate who was more responsible for passing along this stunning… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…
When you buy an Apple Watch, you have to make one big decision: 38mm or 42mm. Rule of thumb: girls buy 38mm, boys 42. Having a bigger display is always helpful but you don't want the watch to be too big for your wrist. This one decision will set the size of your arm bands. Trust me, you will have a collection that lasts longer than one Watch. At the entry level you also have to decide whether you want LTE or not. It's an option. You can buy it but you don't have to use it right away. That's where you can stop spending. You have multiple choices for colors and bands, and many of them cost the same.
Since buyers want choice and vendors also like to charge as much as the buyer wants to spend, there are more expensive options. You can buy a steel case in two colors instead of the standard aluminium one. You can buy multiple leather bands or steel bands. As soon as you decide for a steel case, LTE becomes standard.
Beyond that we enter the luxury sector. With the original Watch Apple tried to sell a really expensive gold case, but customers weren't too interested. Then they partnered with Hermès which contributed fancy leather bands and exclusive watch faces. This worked much better. And with Apple Watch Series 2 Apple introduced a white ceramic case and called it Watch Edition. Watch Edition Series 3 also comes in grey.
This is a Watch Edition 3 in white. I always liked to wear white bands on the original Stainless Steel Watch, and even on the space grey Series 2 aluminium watch. For Series 3 I wanted to go back to stainless steel, although I never made a scratch into the softer aluminium case. But then ... what the heck. Go all the way. Now it's white bands only. And it's very pretty. This is not the original band. It's the white Nike Sport band and it's by far my favorite band.
To those who don't know about Apple watches, Edition actually looks cheaper than Stainless Steel. At first you might thing it's glossy plastic. Only if you look closer you understand it is ceramic. And it does not scratch. It is however a coating. And that means the case is slightly larger and so is the digital crown. It's not as ribbed as the Steel one. And since the body itself is larger, the screen doesn't quite flow so smoothly into the case. There is a noticeable ridge. I find it pretty because it adds a little extra shine to the white body but others may be disappointed.
With Edition you don't just get the Watch, a band and the 2m inductive charge cable. There is bedside charging dock which I like a lot more than I expected, an extra Lightning cable for the dock and a shorter 1m inductive charging cable for your travel. This is something that Apple could improve in the future. You need this special cable. Watch Series 3 does not charge on Qi chargers. Yes, I tried.
As I said, customers want choice. In the luxury segment I prefer Edition White over Grey and also over Hermès because I do not like leather bands. I prefer the Stainless Steel case over the black one. And at the entry level I find the space grey option nicer than gold or silver.
No matter what you prefer, it is always an Apple Watch, and they do the same things. And please, don't buy a Series 1.
1) Broaden your audience focus. Facebook is the best example. Facebook jumped from Harvard to ivy-league schools, to all almost all educational institutions to just over everyone in just over two years.
2) Double down on your existing audience. StackOverflow and Kaggle are good examples. Begin with one functional purpose you can help your audience with and gradually find more and more ways to be useful.
For most of us, I’d go with the latter.
Let’s imagine you manage a community for marketers.
Your interviews might reveal that using the right technology remains a big challenge.
You might develop a community dedicated to marketing tech. This might mean a reviews platform, latest news about platforms, comparison guides, and listed rates. You win by becoming the best source of quality information about which tech platforms to use.
If that succeeds you might expand to implementation of tech platforms, migrations between platforms, setting up an approved list of vendors, and how to get the most out of each technology marketers use.
If that succeeds you might move to processes. This might mean having the best list of case studies, tips, building up the best experts to participate and share information.
If that goes well you might move into recruitment etc…etc…
The ultimate goal is to be the destination where your audience can get all the help they could possibly need. But you can’t rush it. You have to ferociously commit to tackling each stage in turn. Target the specific focus at each stage and make sure you put an overwhelming amount of resources into making it work.
Pedal, pedal, pedal, coast, feather the break, stop, wait, repeat. Red lights are the bane of the urban commuter’s existence, yours and mine, but let’s backpedal for a minute. Despite the deceptive title of this post, we’re not talking about board shorts, single fins, and beach blanket bingo. Nope. This is still a bike site. We’re talking about green light after green light after green light. Surfing the bicycle green waves of San Francisco, none of which currently reside in Ocean Beach.
Although there is no formal definition, a green wave is loosely defined by the coordination of 2 or more green lights in a row, allowing traffic to flow continuously down a given street.
The term was actually coined in the 1960s by the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Federal Railway), who used the term “garantiert grüne Welle” (Guaranteed Green Wave) in their advertisements to entice the general public to choose rail over automobile due to it’s limited delays and open track blocks.
Nowadays, however, the green wave is a concept largely associated with motor vehicles, and actually boasts plenty of great benefits for them: lower fuel consumption, less time waiting in traffic, lower harmful emissions, etc.
As great as that is, we’re not here to talk about the cars...or the trains.
A Shift in Focus
As with most things, before we move forward, we must first look back. It was the early 2000’s in a city renowned for it’s progressive bicycle infrastructure. Yep, I’m talking about Copenhagen. They’d already implemented some of the finest, most efficient bike lanes the world had to offer and were out to tackle a whole other beast: the flow of traffic.
Legend has it there was a brainstorm spearheaded by city councilman and former actor Klaus Bondam that led to the borrowing and implementation of motor vehicle green wave principles but for a far greater cause. The velocipede agenda.
Photo Credit: Copenhagenize Design Co.
Experimental as it was, the proof was in the pudding. By implementing green waves on high traffic streets during rush hour, they had yielded an increase in average commute speed, massively reduced stops for cyclists along the wave, and created an overall more enjoyable ride. A huge step in the right direction for cycling cities all over the world. Copenhagen had yet again set the bar for cycling infrastructure in an urban city.You can read a full case study here.
So where do we fit in?
Flash forward from the early 2000’s in Copenhagen to the slightly later, but still early 2000’s in San Francisco. The year was 2009 and SFMTA was hot on the tails of the Danish, installing the city’s first green wave on our very own Valencia Street.
The signs declaring the waves existence may not make themselves the most apparent, but it’s difficult not to notice that you’re hitting upwards of 8 green lights in a row. A feeling much akin to surfing, but without all the “locals only” stuff. Throw a shaka to your fellow cyclist, cause it’s a party wave. Good vibes all around.
Not surprisingly, the response from the cycling community in San Francisco was overwhelmingly positive. As a result, year by year, we would see more green waves pop up. Instead of riding to work, the commuters of San Francisco were now surfing.
Take Folsom Street for instance:
Is dialing 7 red lights all the way down to 0 on the commute across Folsom a score for the cyclists? Absolutely. But being the infrastructure nerds we are here at Mission Bicycle, we had to ask a few questions. For that, we reached out to Laura Stonehill, Assistant Engineer at the SF Municipal Transportation Agency to see what the process was like from a city planning perspective.
Q&A With Laura Stonehill at SFMTA
First, I’m wondering what city inspired us to implement green waves for cyclists? I’m told green waves have long been a thing for cars, and even longer for trains.
When I say “green wave” I mean “green wave for bicyclists”. We have lots of green waves for cars too- think Franklin Street, etc. The general term for all of this would be signal coordination. Signal coordination could also be used to slow down vehicles, for traffic calming purposes.
I don’t have too much insight into what inspired my coworkers to install the first green wave on Valencia Street, but I can take an educated guess. Valencia Street is a very popular bike corridor and in December 2009 the bus was removed from this corridor. I’m guessing my coworkers saw an opportunity to improve cyclist comfort on a street that had lots of cyclists traffic, without impacting transit. There are vehicles on Valencia too, but there are parallel streets that are faster through-streets for motorists.
Have any other cities reached out to us for help in creating green waves of their own?
I’ve had cities contact me about our methodology, including NYC and San Jose. I presented a poster about green waves at the Pro Walk Pro Bike Pro Place Conference last fall and lots of cities were interested.
A certain source (Ahem, Wiki) claims that Valencia street was one of the first green waves to work simultaneously in both directions. Is that true? If so, how were we able to accomplish this?
Looking at my emails, a coworker said Amsterdam had a two-way green wave in 2007. Our first green wave, on Valencia, was also two-way, and was installed in 2009. I don’t know if Amsterdam was the first though.
Actually, all of our green waves on two-way streets are two-way green waves. It’s definitely easier to design a green wave with a wide band (a green wave that encompasses all or most of a signal’s green time) on a one-way street, but it’s not that hard on a two way street if the design speeds and distance between signals work out. Worst case, the band becomes narrower (only bikes that are traveling in a certain part of the green phase will hit the next green light.)
How many green waves, in total, do we have in San Francisco? Which streets do these run?
I would say we have 7 green waves, since the Folsom from 11th to 12th isn’t long enough to really be called a greenwave.
Is there any research to show that green waves have improved the safety of cyclists? Or is it simply making our commutes quicker and more enjoyable?
The only before-after data we collected was just to show that the green waves were functioning as designed. We have heard anecdotally (and I’ve experienced personally) that they make bike travel quicker and more enjoyable. I don’t know if any other cities or organizations have done more safety research.
Are there plans to create more green waves in the future? If so, what areas make the most sense from a city planning perspective? We feel like we’ve been well treated in the Mission.
I am not aware of any plans to install more green waves, but the SFMTA is currently starting a big project to retime all of our signals in the downtown area (SOMA and north of Market in the downtown area), so it’s possible more may be added. In general, places where green waves work are places with bike lanes, with all signalized intersections with the signals on the same system (with the same cycle length and “clock”), where transit doesn’t have conflicting needs, where we have high volumes of cyclists, etc.
I know this is for a bike blog, but many people reading are probably also at least part-time motorists. Have the green waves had any adverse effects on the flow of motor vehicle traffic? As far as I can see, things seem to move along fine.
The corridors where we implemented green waves weren’t optimized for vehicles beforehand (the offsets were all pretty random), so the bike green waves didn’t really make anything worse for vehicles. One green wave disrupted some progression on an intersecting street, and a taxi driver who is very familiar with our signal timing called us to ask about the change. When we explained the improvement for cyclists, he was satisfied. Other than that, I haven’t heard anything about vehicles being impacted.
Time is money
So how much “money” is the SFMTA saving me every year? Well, let’s look at the Folsom case study for a little help. The “before” stats show our rider moving along from 14th to 24th in 5 minutes and 56 seconds at an average speed of 10mph, whereas the “after” stats have the rider completing the same trek in just 5 minutes and 18 seconds. Okay, saving 38 seconds isn’t exactly a game changer, but let’s extrapolate that.
Let’s say you bike just that one stretch of road 2 times a day, to and from work, 4 times a week. You work the occasional day from your home office (must be nice) and call in sick every now and then. If there’s 52 weeks in the year, we’re looking at 208 days you save 38 seconds twice. You’re saving yourself 4.39111111 hours a year. Your mind still isn’t blown, and that’s okay.
But what could possibly make that okay? Wasn’t saving time the whole point of this article? Plot twist. Nope, and here’s why: Because we don’t ride bikes to work for the sole purpose of saving hours out of the year. We ride our bikes to work because we love riding bikes. We ride our bikes to work because it’s fun.
Although the green waves may not save us a ridiculous amount of time on our daily commute, They are proof that SFMTA does care about the urban commuter and they manage to come through with something far better than saving time: They make your commute exponentially more enjoyable. The saving 4.39111111 hours of your life a year is just a bonus. The real prize is hitting zero reds from end to end on a long stretch of road.
It’s called surfing, and you can’t help but smile when it happens.
Die Verbrannte-Erde-Kampagne der Amis gegen Kaspersky geht in die nächste Phase. Angeblich hatte ein NSA Contractor irgendwas von Kaspersky installiert, und "die Russen" haben ihn darüber ausgespäht und seine Daten geklaut. Oder so. Und wenn wir schon unbelegt herumraunen, können wir auch gleich noch eine Packung Name Dropping machen!
A spring discovery would mean the NSA became aware of the breach just weeks before two other significant security incidents for the agency: A cryptic group known as the ShadowBrokers starting to leak alleged NSA hacking tools online and contractor Hal Martin was arrested for hoarding classified information on his home computer.
*raun* *gerücht*
Meine Güte, muss die US-Schlangenölindustrie eine Angst vor Kaspersky haben, dass die sich zu solchen Schmierkampagnen genötigt sehen. Au weia.
Also wenn ich Kaspersky wäre, würde ich jetzt einmal alles verklagen, was nicht bei drei auf den Bäumen ist. Wenn das keine böswillige Geschäftsschädigung ist, dann weiß ich auch nicht.
One of the things that makes Plex magical is the ability to stream all your media to all your devices, no matter where you are in the world – it’s pretty amazing, really, until there’s a disturbance in The Force: maybe your roommate fired up the microwave for yet another Hot Pocket. (The top of the microwave really isn’t the best spot for your WiFi router… but I digress.)
Despite all the impressive tech under the hood, let’s face it, many of us have experienced the dreaded “buffering” from time to time. Well, today we’re here to tell you about a few new features that will ensure your streams keep streaming even as your Hot Pockets are heating.
Auto Quality (Free)
Plex has always let you pick your video streaming quality: full HD while you’re home on the couch, or slightly-less-than-HD when you’re parachuting into a Central American jungle to deprive a republic of its banana. The only problem is, picking a quality manually is a bit like playing darts blindfolded: you’re just as likely to hit the bullseye as the person next to you. Add in a few simultaneous streams, and it gets even worse: now you’re blindfolded, hangry, and someone just put $20 in the jukebox and hit shuffle on Jimmy Buffett.
The Auto Quality feature worked so well for our Plex Pass users that we decided to enable the feature for everyone. It’s available today on web, Android, iOS, Android TV, and Apple TV. To start using it, simply turn on the “Automatically Adjust Quality” option in the Quality settings of the app.
Hardware-Accelerated Streaming (Plex Pass)
Are you sitting on a reasonably modern CPU or GPU? Are you tired of your Plex server heating half your house in the winter? (Note: This last part is not always bad – it literally might have saved Leo’s life in Titanic. Or in The Revenant. Why is he always SO DAMN COLD??)
We’re Team Kate / Bear here, so it brings us great pleasure to introduce hardware-accelerated streaming. This allows Plex Media Server to take advantage of dedicated hardware support to convert video dramatically more efficiently than ever before. This translates into more streams at higher quality (even HD! 4K!), less processor power, and happy-ass polar bears. Everyone wins! (except Leo.)
Hardware-accelerated streaming is available today for Plex Pass subscribers. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux with modern Intel processors that support Intel Quick Sync. Some AMD GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs are also supported on Windows and Mac.
In order to illustrate how hard this streaming stuff really is, we recruited Barkley and a garden-variety hose. In this visual metaphor, the water is your episode of The Bachelorette: All that is pure and good in this world. This is the stream upon which Plex feeds. Barkley is the unknown, striking down upon your stream with great vengeance and furious anger. And the grass? Well, the grass represents the plight of the proletariat. Everyone pisses on them. Don’t be the grass.
Tl;dr – Update your Plex Media Server to experience even smoother streaming using Auto Quality and Hardware-Accelerated Streaming.
On Tuesday, October 3, 2017, the Federal Government of Canada awarded Bell and Rogers a $432.1 million contract to provide its employees with cellular service, Minister of Public Services and Minister responsible for Shared Services Canada Carla Qualtrough announced.
Bell will provide approximately 230,000 federal government employees — and their mobile devices — with cellular service for the next six years. Should the carrier be unable to meet the needs of the government, Rogers will step in to fill in any gaps.
“These new contracts consolidate and modernize the Government of Canada’s information technology, providing public servants with tools they need to stay connected, and to efficiently deliver services to Canada,” said Minister Qualtrough in a prepared statement.
It appears federal government employees will get some version of Rogers and Bell’s top-tier data plans. According to the government, employee plans include unlimited nationwide long-distance calling, international roaming and free voice-to-mail text messaging services. In addition, each employee will have a flexible data plan that adjusts based on usage, ensuring that they don’t incur any overage charges.
Flash memory manufacturer SanDisk has announced a new line of ‘Industrial’ SD cards.
Available in both SD and microSD formats, the company’s new flash memory is rated to operate without issues in temperatures between -25 degrees celsius and 85 degrees celsius, making them perfect for a country like Canada with its cold winters and high temperature variance. The Class 10 cards are also exceedingly fast, with read and write times that measure in at 50 MB/s and 80 MB/s, respectively.
SanDisk currently plans to offer Industrial line SD Cards with up to 64GB of storage, and microSD cards with up to 128GB of storage. The company will also release a XI version of its new SD card that can continue to operate in up to -40 degrees celsius weather.
According to SanDisk, the cards are designed for ‘demanding industrial applications.’ To that end, the company envisions the new SD cards being used in commercial surveillance cameras, drones, industrial IoT gateways, factory automation and other network equipment.
That said, it’s easy to see how adventure seekers could get a lot of use out of the cards as well.
The organizations include Barrick Gold, Bell Canada, Capgemini Canada, Cimcorp, Deloitte Canada, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), FedEx, Fujitsu, the Institute on Governance, Interac/Acxsys, KPMG LLP, Loblaw Companies Limited, MKS Switzerland, Moog, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, and Tencent.
“We are pleased to welcome these forward-thinking organizations to our initiative,” said executive chairman and co-founder Don Tapscott. “The rapid growth in our membership is a strong indication of the importance that companies and government agencies are placing on understanding the impact that blockchain technology will have on their business and the world.”
The Blockchain Research Institute launched in March 2017 with $2 million in funding from the Ontario government and companies like Paycase and Nuco.
“Tencent blockchain is committed to providing enterprise-class blockchain infrastructure, industry solutions, and safe, reliable and flexible blockchain cloud services,” said Ray Guo, Head of Blockchain Innovation Lab, Vice General Manager of Financial Technology at Tencent. “Blockchain Research Institute provides a great platform for Tencent and other members of the institute to carry out blockchain research and discussion, which is of great significance to Tencent and the industry. We believe that the blockchain+ era is coming!”
The Institute explores the impact of blockchain in industries like financial services, manufacturing, energy and technology. There are currently 70 research projects underway.
Apple is taking a progressive stance with its new emoji coming to iOS 11.1.
Not only will iPhone and iPad users express themselves with “more emotive smiley faces,” they’ll also be able to utilize gender-neutral characters as well.
Among the “hundreds of new emoji” coming to iOS11.1 are mythical creature, clothing, and new food characters.
The update to iOS 11 will also include an update to the ‘Love-You’ gesture, designed to resemble the “I love you” hand sign in American Sign Language
The new emoji will debut with iOS 11.1, sometime next week.
Seven of nine candidates for a one-year seat on Vancouver City Council gathered today at SFU to converse with event attendees. Missing were Diego Cardona of Vision and Joshua Wasilenkoff.
The recurring topic was lack of affordable housing, and the resulting change to the face and shape of the city’s people. Prominent solutions were: tax the rich and their mansions, freeze rents, rezone the 70-80% of land that is now exclusionary, build lots of missing middle, get governments back into social housing, free transit for workers.
Note that some of these solutions can’t be implemented by City Council, due to pesky jurisdictional issues.
Pete Fry reminded us all that a second Green councilor would enable a flow of Green Party motions for open debate. This is technically difficult now since there is no second Green councilor to second such motions. Still got that vote problem, though.
As seated from left to right:
BREMNER, Hector (NPA); CARDONA, Diego (Vision Vancouver); DUNSDON, Mary Jean “Watermelon” (Sensible Vancouver); FRY, Pete (Green Party); GRAVES, Judy, (OneCity); LEE, Gary; MURPHY, Damian J.; SWANSON, Jean.
Which way is it going? HERE‘s Charlie Smith in the Straight fearlessly handicapping the race on the left. And you can take a totally non-credible wildly-unscientific poll at the end of the article. Below is the poll’s standings as of 4 pm, Thursday Oct 5. Published fearlessly by PT for bemusement purposes only.
Smart technology has benefited cities in more ways than we can imagine. When you commute in the morning, you might benefit from smart technology by using a mobile app that informs you of when the next train arrives. And, as you enter the station, you could tap a fare card for quick and easy access to public transit.
Smart technology can also have far-reaching implications beyond modern convenience. It can make our cities healthier and cleaner. For example, Beijing, notorious for air pollution, is testing a 23-foot-tall air purifier that detects and vacuums up smog, filters the bad particles and releases clear air.
To give cities and Indigenous communities across Canada a chance to showcase their best ideas for applying smart technology,
Canada is launching its first Smart Cities Challenge.
According to Infrastructure Canada, the federal department leading the Challenge, a smart city uses technology and data to improve livability and opportunities for a city and its people:
“Smart cities have the potential to improve every aspect of community
life – how people move around, how they live and play, how they earn a
living, how they learn and are empowered to participate in society, how
they interact with the natural environment, and how they create safe and
secure public spaces.”
Through the Smart Cities Challenge, the Government will work in
collaboration with cities and communities that are ready to innovate and
take risks – providing financial and in-kind support for their smart
cities transformation.
Three rounds are planned, with the first set to launch in Fall
2017. Details on this round and the timing of subsequent rounds will
follow in the coming months.
Each round will include:
one large prize of $50 million;
two prizes of $10 million for mid-sized communities;
one prize of $5 million for a small community; and
one prize of $5 million available for an Indigenous community.
Now, you might think I’m crazy to say that (even more than usual). You might, like my wife, consider shoelaces to be the international winner of the First-World Problems Pageant. You might wonder why there’s an entire industry of products designed to replace shoelaces.
But the fact that that these products exist tells you that I’m not alone. That millions of people consider shoelaces to be a time-consuming, fussy, antique technology.
Shoelaces come undone, they drag in the mud, they get filthy, they flop into escalators and injure people. Thousands of people struggle to tie them at all—the very young, the very old, and the disabled. Every time you double-knot a kid’s shoes to stay tied, a little voice should tell you that something’s wrong with that design.
So this week, I dug into four of those shoelace-replacement technologies. (There are many more, but most follow the same design principles as these four.) And I’m happy to report that, 925 words from now, you’ll know exactly what to buy so that you, too, can abandon the crude, clumsy, centuries-old practice of tying and untying shoes.
$12 buys you six tiny plastic tabs (enough for three pairs of shoes), each pierced with three holes. To install them, you’re supposed to re-route your existing laces so that they enter the topmost shoelace holes from the outside. Then, using an in/out/around pathway, you fasten the lace to the plastic tab on the inside of your shoe. You’ll wind up watching the installation video a few times.
The Lace Anchors sit inside the shoe, holding the lace tight.
Once you’ve fastened the lace exactly to your preferred tension, you’re supposed to cut off the remaining six inches (or whatever) of lace.
Supposedly, your shoes are now slip-ons. The laces are locked forever at the tension you’ve selected, so you never have to tie them again.
The first time I tried them on my running shoes, they were secure, but they didn’t feel secure, because there was no longer a lace crossing the tongue. The tongue flopped out like a golden retriever’s. It looked and felt sloppy.
With no lace across the top, the tongues kind of flapped around.
I left a question on the company’s website; no response.
Finally, I thought: Maybe I should lace all the way up to the rarely-used top hole, the one that’s nearly at your ankle.
That method solved the floppy-tongue problem, but now there was another issue: There’s no one tension that makes your shoes both secure on your feet and easy to get in and out of.
It makes sense if you think about it: One of the few virtues of laces is that you can make the shoe tight or loose on command, so you can get your feet in and out. Lace Anchors eliminate the option to loosen up your shoes, so getting them on becomes a struggle.
Hickies
I’m not entirely clear on why these shoelace replacements are named after the red mark you get when someone bites your skin or sucks hard. Not sure that’s the association I’d want with my product.
Anyway, Hickies, available in a range of colors ($18 a set), are rubber straps that loop through your shoelace holes and clasp shut. Once they’re installed, the thought goes, the “give” of the elastic makes it easy to slip your shoes on and off.
Hickies are rubber loops, kept closed by pushing a hard plastic nub through a “buttonhole.”
It’s a nice idea. The problem is that they’re all the same length. On my shoes, that means that the bottom holes wind up too loose. I wouldn’t want to run in them.
On the Hickies site, various diagrams show how you can thread the loops diagonally, rather than horizontally, to make them looser or tighter. With experimentation, you can probably find an arrangement that works, but it’s a fussy process.
Some of the various Hickes “lacing” styles to adjust tightness or looseness.
Zubits
Zubits are magnets. You install them by threading your laces through them.
At that point, after some fluffing and adjustment, you can fasten your shoes just by bringing the faces of the magnets together. You can buy them in three strengths (think Kids, Normal, and Extreme Sports); I found that the normal ones (strength 2) held incredibly firmly through walking, running, and silly fake dance routines.
Zubits snap together with powerful, directed magnets.
And yet—to get them off, you just step on your shoe’s heel and step out. The Zubits pop instantly and helplessly apart. Because the stepping-forward business stresses the bond at an angle, they give up their grip without so much as a whimper.
The ingenious part of the design is that all the magnetic force is on the connecting surfaces of the magnets. The rest of these metal blocks aren’t magnetic. They don’t, for example, attract paper clips as you walk through the office.
I love these guys, for one simple reason: they replace the tying business without replacing the open/shut cycle. In other words, you’re not locking your shoes into one tension, as with the Lace Anchors; you’re bringing the two sides of the shoe together just as you do when tying them. Except you’re doing it with a single, satisfying click!
The downside of the Zubits is that they look a little funny. They scream, “I’ve replaced shoelaces with technology!” And, at $22, they’re not cheap.
Zubits come in a range of colors. (So do all of these products, actually.)
But they work beautifully, and they’re super fun to snap together and apart. I can think of many preschoolers, in particular, who’d be delighted with Zubits.
Lock Laces
Lock Laces replace your existing laces with elastic ones, which you secure at the top with a sliding spring-loaded clip.
LaceLocks replace your laces with elastic ones.
I wasn’t expecting much; at $8, these are the least expensive solution I could find. But this solution works perfectly. You can get more slack to put in your foot, and then briskly snug the shoe up with the clip.
To open or close the LaceLocks, you press the spring-loaded clasp and slide it along the laces.
Better yet, the feeling of a LaceLocked running shoe is amazing. The embrace of your foot isn’t rigid, as with regular laces; there’s a certain flexibility, a sort of breathing as your foot moves. It feels great, and yet the shoe remains incredibly secure all the way down your foot.
Back to the Future
“Back to the Future II,” of course, exhibited a fantasy of the ultimate self-tying shoe:
Nike (NKE) later rose to the challenge by creating limited-edition pairs of the real-world Nike Air Mags in 2016, which came pretty close to the “Back to the Future” ideal: Step in, and the straps mechanically clinch. (Nike auctioned off the 89 pairs to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.)
Nike says that it will continue to work on the self-tying shoe concept. In the meantime, I recommend the LaceLocks or the Zubits. OK?
Now that that’s taken care of, it’s time to move on to solving the next most pressing problems: the TV remote being too far away, your wallet being too full, and running out of ketchup packets for your fries.
David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, is the author of “iPhone: The Missing Manual.” He welcomes nontoxic comments in the comments section below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email.
Another two friends died yesterday. They were well known men in our community and both part of the hosting world on our little Bowen Island, integral to providing experiences for visitors that allow us to provide well hosted learning experiences for people here. They didn’t always do it loudly, but they left legacies that are so important to what we are able to do here.
It has been a really strange few months with 9 deaths of people I know to various degrees; from close friends to intimate strangers. Two from suicide, one from a heart attack, the rest from cancer. Several “before their time.” It’s numbing. There are moments I’ve lost count of who has died since July.
I have been thinking lately – especially reflecting on the suicides – that perhaps my job might be to pick up the unclaimed portion of joy that my friends left in the world. It is a crazy world. There is suffering all around us and I understand the idea that “remaining normal in an insane world is insane.” Yet I feel strongly how life moves in me and through my friendships, and communities. I feel immense gratitude for fleeting moments and I realize that I am at times a fierce practitioner of play. Whether I’m playing soccer with my son in our local recreational league, playing music with my daughter and friends, creating workshops, supporting my local soccer teams by singing with hundreds in support of our players – I feel the intense surge of life that comes with the portion of joy that is left to me to claim.
These days I sing for Kay and Dan, the two Shannons, Kieran and Chris, Matthew and the three others (wow, I just remembered one more.) I sing and play for me, find sensemaking in a crazy world in the presence of connections with friends and strangers over the long cadence of lives intertwined or the fleeting moment of random encounters on the buses, sidewalks and trails.
Bernie de Koeven, a master practitioner of play, who himself is dying publically, shared this quote from a comment on his blog followed by his own reflection:
“Speaking of the very end, I recently read a modern classic, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. It explains culture (which I think includes play) as an outcome of this denial. In a sense then, we should not “be calm and carry on” to the very end, but arbitrarily, playfully, insistently dedicate ourselves to the never-ending. I think this is what many people mean by “love” and maybe what Bernie means by play.”
So we have on one side love and play; and on the other, the dead and dying; the somber and despairing. We mustn’t let ourselves get confused by any of these. Love and life, after all, are manifestations of each other. Love is the invitation to life. As is play. It’s all a matter of perspective, don’t you know. From this side, it’s all so obvious: love, play, life. Fear. Dread. Death.
You stand here. The rest there.
Feel the embrace.
So that’s where I am these days. I know the world is crazy right now. I know it’s hard to find the good in the news but you won’t find it there because the news asks you to be only a passive consumer of the world’s pain and joy. What we need to do is rise from our seats and participate in the world as fully as possible. Life is the ultimate infinite game. The joy we seek is located in the little interactions and small kindnesses initiated or received; in play.
My wish for all of us is that we can claim the portion of unclaimed joy that others have left for us, and especially those who rode who claimed more than their share of suffering and rode it to their their end. I know clearly what they want for us, those they loved and whom they left behind. It is to continue living.
I’m here, playing, hunting joy, embracing it when it comes. Not always finding it, but cultivating the eye that sees it in the small and subtle currents of living. And you’re there too, doing your thing, but now reading this and playing along, at least in this moment.
Frequent source of smartphone leaks, Evan Blass, has done it again, with his latest offering showing off TLC’s rumoured upcoming BlackBerry smartphone.
Blass says the device is called ‘BlackBerry Motion,’ which indicates the smartphone has ditched its original ‘Krypton‘ codename if this information is accurate.
If correct, which Blass usually is, this smartphone will be an ‘all-display’ device, which means it won’t feature a keyboard, a fact TCL’s chief communications officer Francois Mahieu discussed during IFA this year. The device is also set to feature IP67 water and dust resistance and includes a battery that can last more than 26 hours.
Additionally, if this is simply a name switch from ‘Krypton’ to motion, the device is rumoured to feature a Snapdragon 625 chipset, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 4GB of RAM, a 4,000mAh battery and a fingerprint sensor.
TCL, the manufacturers of BlackBerry-branded smartphones, is set to unveil its next BlackBerry smartphone sometime this month.
An analyst from the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) believes that the government hasn’t learned its lesson from the previous spectrum auction in 2015.
Earlier this year, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains proposed setting aside 30MHz of spectrum for bidding by non-incumbents, a group defined by the CRTC as those with less than 10 percent of the national wireless subscriber market share.
Martin Masse, the MEI’s former director of research and publications, believes that such a tactic would be a mistake.
According to an October 5th, 2017 media release, Masse believes that “experience has shown that such measures essentially constitute public subsidies that are either lost to weak new entrants that consistently fail, or wasted on established regional players that would have had the means to bid for the full value of the spectrum.”
“The federal government’s rules have also delayed the use — or the more efficient use — of spectrum frequencies that were wasted on the failed companies or were simply unused by the license holders,” reads an excerpt from the same release.
Michel Kelly-Gagnon, president and CEO of the MEI, also added that setting aside a certain amount of spectrum for smaller wireless players is counter to the purpose of an open auction.
“Open, competitive auctions are supposed to lead to a more optimal allocation of resources than arbitrary decisions by politicians and bureaucrats,” said Kelly-Gagnon, in the same release. “The proposed set-aside defeats that purpose. If the government really believes we need more competition in the wireless sector, it should let it happen, plain and simple.”
As I write this, I’m in an apartment in Barcelona, after speaking and running a workshop at an event.
On Sunday, there was a vote for Catalonian independence. It went ahead due to the determination of teachers (who kept schools open as voting centres), the bravery of firemen and Catalan police (who resisted Spanish police), and… technology.
As I mentioned in the first section of my presentation on Wednesday, I’m no expert on Spanish politics, but I am very interested in the Catalonian referendum from a technological point of view. Not only did the Spanish government take a heavy-handed approach by sending in masked police to remove ballot boxes, but they applied this to the digital domain, raiding internet service providers, blocking websites, and seizing control of referendum-related websites.
Yet, people still accessed websites that helped them vote. In fact, around 42% managed to do so, despite all of the problems and potential danger in doing so. By way of contrast, no more than 43% of the population has ever voted in a US Presidential election(see comments section). There have been claims of voting irregularities (which can be expected when Spanish police were using batons and rubber bullets), but of those who voted, 90% voted in favour of independence.
People managed to find out the information they required through word of mouth and via websites that were censorship-resistant. The technologists responsible for keeping the websites up despite interference from Madrid used IPFS, which stands for Inter Planetary File System. IPFS is a decentralised system which manages to remove the reliance on a single point of failure (or censorship) while simultaneously solving problems around inefficiencies caused by unecessary file duplication.
The problem with IPFS, despite its success in this situation is that it’s mainly used via the command line. As much as I’d like everyone to have some skills around using terminal windows, realistically that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon in a world of Instagram and Candy Crush.
Instead, I’ve been spending time investigating ZeroNet, which is specifically positioned as providing “open, free and uncensorable websites, using bitcoin cryptography and bitorrent network”. Instead of there being ‘gateways’ through which you can access ZeroNet sites through the open web, you have to install it and then run it locally in a web browser. It’s a lot easier than it sounds, and the cross-platform functionality has an extremely good-looking user interface.
I’ve created a ‘Doug, uncensored’ blog using ZeroNet. This can be accessed via anyone who is running the service and knows the (long) address. When you access the site you’re accessing it on your own machine and then serving it up to — just like with bittorrent. It’s the realisation of the People’s Cloud idea that Vinay Gupta came up with back in 2013. The great thing about that is the websites work even when you’re offline, and sync when you re-connect.
As with constant exhortations for people to be more careful about their privacy and security, so decentralised technologies might seem ‘unnecessary’ by most people when everything is going fine. However, just as we put curtains on our windows and locks on our doors, and sign contracts ‘just in case’ something goes wrong, so I think decentralised technologies should be our default.
Why do we accept increased centralisation and surveillance as the price of being part of the digital society? Why don’t we take back control?
Again, as I mentioned in my presentation on Wednesday, we look backwards too much when we’re talking about digital skills, competencies, and literacies. Instead, let’s look forward and ensure that the next generation of technologies don’t sell us down the river for advertising dollars.
Have a play with ZeroNet and, if you want to really think through where we might be headed with all of this, check out Bitnation.
Go to store.google.com and try to find any reference to Android Wear. They disappeared yesterday. You have to be very ignorant to not understand what that means.
The Teachable Machine from Støj, Use All Five, and Google is a fun experiment that lets you “teach” your computer. Your webcam is used as an input device, and using deeplearn.js, you can make three classifications that change the output. Use different hand gestures, faces, or movements to signal differences, and you can see probabilities change in real-time.
It’s hard to believe this stuff runs so smoothly in the browser now. I remember learning this back in college. The training and usage in some heavy software package was laborious.
One Vancouver developer is dealing directly with the problem of condo buyers who purchase condos prior to occupancy, and then “re-assign” or sell the contract to another buyer prior to completion, pocketing the proceeds. While the Real Estate Council has regulations around “assigning” single family houses, there is no similar regulation of condos prior to occupancy, and this activity has boosted the price of units.
As Joanne Lee-Young in the Vancouver Sun reports prices started at $890 a square foot for a 450 square foot unit in a 53 storey tower called One Burrard Place at Drake Street. That amounted to $400,000 for that unit in the winter of 2015. By early 2016, with all 354 units sold prior to building, condo prices increased around 40 per cent and the cost for a similar unit was about $1,250 a square foot.
President and CEO of Reliance Properties Jon Stovell noted that there was a “rapid increase in requests by buyers to re-assign pre-sale condo units at One Burrard. As well, there have been reports of “unauthorized advertising of (One Burrard) assignments” online, in particular on private realtor websites and through emails and social media.” And he came up with a solution: instead of accepting 1.5 per cent of the initial purchase price back to the developer in order to gain permission to assign the sale to a new buyer, the seller must pay 25 per cent of the profit made on the assignment. Hoping to discourage speculation, Jon Stovell observed ““There has already been a regulatory shift in the single-family market where it is automatic in all contracts that if there is any ‘assignment lift’ the proceeds will go back to the homeowner.”
Stovell also noted that while some buyers are upset that the developer is taking what the buyer perceives as their “windfall” before assigning the property, those buyers are welcome to wait until the condos are completed, and sell the units after the building is completed. The re-assignment of condo units appear in a variety of websites so it is difficult to ascertain how many buyers are trying to resell their units prior to construction completion. What will be interesting is to see whether the 25 per cent payback to the developer limits the flipping of units prior to occupancy, and whether that contains some of the rising sale prices of these condo units.
When the team here at Cyborgology first started working on The Quantified Mind, a collaboratively authored post about the increasing metrification of academic life, production, and “success”, I immediately reached out to Zach Kaiser, a close friend and collaborator. Last year, Zach produced Our Program, a short film narrated by a professor from a large research institution at which a newly implemented set of performance indicators has the full attention of the faculty.
For my post this week, then, I’d like to consider Zach an Artist in Residence at Cyborgology—someone using the production and dissemination of works that embody the types of cultural phenomena or theories covered on the blog (as it turns out, this is not Zach’s first film featured on Cyborgology). I suppose it’s up to him if he’d like to include the position on his CV. In the following, I would like to present some of my reactions to the film and let Zach respond, hopefully raising questions that can be asked in dialogue with the ones presented at the end of The Quantified Mind. In full disclosure, I am very familiar with Zach’s scholarship and art (I’m listed as a co-author or co-artist on much of it, though not Our Program in particular), so I hope I don’t lead the witness too much here.
As a classically trained designer teaching in the art department of a Research I school, Zach’s perspective is valuable here for a number of reasons: obviously his day-to-day is highly influenced by the metrification trend in academia (especially considering his pre-tenure status), but he has worked in the commercial realm with companies and organizations enamored with the exact sort of technologically enabled quantification tools and systems (read: big data, et al.) driving the platforms through which academics’ metrics are being tallied. My first reaction to the film, then, is about the use of an object as the main visual here. After all, the film is not about a device—it’s not called Our Ticker or Our Shiny White Box With Seductive Red LEDs, it’s called Our Program; it’s about a cultural phenomenon with, for all intents and purposes, no real consumer-facing physical manifestation (beyond, perhaps, online dashboards or the like).
I’m reminded, however, of a book I recently read, Elizabeth Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence, a brief but fascinating argument for a reconceptualization of AI away from the stereotypical “cool”, emotionless field for mathematicians and computer scientists and into a significantly warmer, more emotional place. Alongside this main pitch, she also suggests that the proliferation and improvement of AI technologies will increase when all parties involved agree on the aforementioned reframing—that is, when AI is understood to be less Skynet, more PARO. One striking piece of research that stands out to me now in the context of Our Program comes in the chapter discussing ELIZA and PARRY, two AI psychoanalysts from the 1960s. Wilson references Sherry Turkle (frequently written about on this blog) and her work on humans’ relationships to technology, but ultimately dismisses this research in favor of Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, who argue that we as a species are drawn to befriend our technological devices, summed up by Wilson as our “direct affiliative inclinations for artificial objects” (95).
ZK: Considering the metrification of academia in the context of affect is something I didn’t originally conceive as part of the work, but I’m reminded here of various efforts (within the humanities) to produce better metrics that are specific to humanities disciplines as opposed to inheriting metrics systems from the “hard” sciences. This strikes me as curious when situated in relationship to PARO or Siri. Ironically, through producing more “humane” metrics, we may end up furthering the idea that humans are fundamentally computational in nature.
A drive to produce more nuanced or, in the case of the humanities, humane metrics, or to make AI more relatable is not about the metrics or the AI themselves but is, I would suggest, about what we think about ourselves as people—whether we are, or are not, at some basic level, computational. The apotheosis of such a belief is a kind of pan-computationalism, where microbes and microchips operate in glorious harmony, not unlike the proclamations made in the poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” by Richard Brautigan. Such a belief also caters to a neoliberalization of all life underpinned by models of self-interested human behavior that reach back to the early days of game theory.
To me, it’s not necessarily about asking whether we want to have affinities with artificial intelligence or computational objects in general but to what degree our affinities with those things become absorbed into our own ontological space, rendering us equally as computational as those objects. In this way, I see a strong connection between efforts to make scholarly metrics more nuanced, sophisticated, contextual, etc., and an affinity towards a PARO over a Skynet.
GS: If you’ve read my recent posts on the value of using obvious fiction in art and design versus trying to seem “real”, then you won’t be surprised that I hope Zach will discuss how he frames his narrative. This is not a piece of marketing. He does not leave his name off of the film. Nor does he call the piece a “product tour” or “brand video” on his website. That said, it is obviously influenced by his real life experiences in academia, experiences that we recognize as very much not unique in The Quantified Mind. Why fiction then?
ZK: I was recently asked if the “parody” can keep up with “reality.” Career benchmarking in higher education in Europe (like Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure here in the States) is increasingly metrics-focused. A european colleague once told me about his dissertation committee, which required him to prove his impact via citations before he could graduate. Universities in the UK are using platforms like Simitive Academic Solutions to address “goal setting and alignment” to produce stronger accountability and incentive systems for faculty members.
I feel as though the fiction is a way of grappling with reality. The object, this “ticker” on which the film centers, is somewhat absurd in both its form and purpose. The intent was to make more explicit the link between the kind of (dare I say) neoliberal, market-based nature of faculty metrics and the physical faculty and university themselves: a “stock-ticker” that illustrates whether or not we as faculty members should continue to receive investment from our institutions. This kind of marketization of faculty data is already happening, and is not necessarily “new,” but the kind of control it wields is shifting. The more sophisticated, contextual, and nuanced the metrics become—not just about citations or number of publications, but about everything related to faculty output (e.g., fitness data via partnerships with FitBit and smart furniture manufacturers to determine whether more fit faculty produce more “impact”, other biometric and psychometric indications to help faculty identify causes of stress that decrease productivity, weighting of metrics based on location, discipline, type of institution)—the more administrators will rely on metrics to shape decision-making processes. As long as we develop ways to demonstrate our fundamentally computational nature, the influence of metrics on academia will be a positive feedback loop, with new metrics being developed, new decisions being based on those metrics, and new metrics being developed in response to the consequences of those decisions.
Gabi Schaffzin is pursuing his PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, with a concentration in art practice, at UC San Diego.
Zach Kaiser is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University.
The two, along with other collaborators, have been working on the Culture Industry [dot] Club, a dynamic assemblage of artist-researchers engaged with emergent media practices and deep historical and theoretical research.
Joseph Planta@Planta
I've given more time seasoning and reseasoning my cast iron pan than attention to most of the interpersonal relationships in my life.
Over the next decade a steady stream of new companies and products will use AI and automation to change the way work gets done across the economy. One of the books that I found time to read this summer was The Economic Singularity by Calum Chace. Calum provides a terrific summary of the debate about the impact that AI will have on individuals and society as the pace of change increases.
I am definitely on one side of this debate -- I believe that we are going to have a very bumpy time ahead of us as one set of human activity is ceded to the machines. Even if we are simultaneously creating new jobs as the old jobs are eliminated, I believe we will have a "lost generation" of workers who will find it difficult to develop the skills required for those new jobs.
So on the one hand automation will improve our lives -- cost reduction, quality improvement, etc -- but on the other hand automation has the potential to disrupt our lives by making it impossible for some members of our society to produce goods or provide services in a way the economy values. The Automation Dilemma.
I believe that those of us involved in the creation or deployment of these new AI and automation tools have a moral responsibility to go beyond the simple objective of "cost reduction" and do things with these technologies that make people's lives better. While reducing costs is not going away as an objective, we should be simultaneously asking how these technologies help us create growth -- both for our companies and for our employees.
Corporate automation initiatives today are typically very top down -- process re-engineering teams and software development teams work together to automate work, largely keeping the process the same but focused on removing people from any tasks that are repetitive, proscribed, and time consuming.
But what if we could approach automation bottoms up? Give automation tools to the employees themselves and ask them to automate the tasks which they know are repetitive, but also identify opportunities to change the way the work gets done by substituting the eliminated time for activities that can create more value for the business. Could companies become better faster if we trusted employees to own the task of improving?
We must find ways to use AI and automation to enhance human potential, increase the time we spend doing things that are uniquely human and find those places where a person plus a machine is greater than either one alone. We humans are curious, creative, problem solvers, relationship builders, empathetic and compassionate. These are qualities we want in ourselves and our society -- let's get our machines to help us be better at using these positive qualities to improve all of our lives.
In line with Microsoft’s post-Windows Phone mobile strategy, the company announced today that its Windows 10 browser, Microsoft Edge, would be coming soon to iOS and Android smartphones. The focus of the mobile browser, at least at first, doesn’t appear to be offering any revolutionary features, but instead providing a more seamless web experience to Windows users on their phones. From Microsoft’s announcement post:
Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android brings familiar features like your Favorites, Reading List, New Tab Page and Reading View across your PC and phone, so, no matter the device, your browsing goes with you. But what makes Microsoft Edge really stand out is the ability to continue on your PC, which enables you to immediately open the page you’re looking at right on your PC—or save it to work on later.
A release date for the app is unknown, but users can gain early access to a preview build starting today. The one major caveat is that in order to gain access to the preview version, you have to visit this page from a PC running the latest preview build of Windows 10. Also of note: this initial release is limited to phones only, so iPad users will have to wait until Edge makes its way to tablet platforms.
There are some big changes coming to Vancouver zoning as reported in Metro News. You can read through the reports on changes to the single family zoning areas and the Grandview/Mount Pleasant areas here. On Tuesday City of Vancouver Council approved policies that will allow for more density on single family lots throughout the city . In the RS single family zones, homeowners will be allowed to build a laneway home, stratify it, and sell it off. The intention is to encourage the maintenance of older Vancouver residences and to build more laneway homes. This is the first time that laneway houses could be split from the original title and sold.
In Grandview Woodlands and in Mount Pleasant that have denser “RT” zones, Council is allowing the number of units on a standard thirty-three foot lot to increase from two dwellings to three. This means that now a house could be built as a duplex with a laneway house in the RT zones. Larger lots will now be allowed to create four unit developments.
In the case of the RT zones, the three units on one lot can be owned by one person, or again can be stratified and sold to separate owners. Laneway homes were originally restricted to the RS traditional single family zoned areas; laneway homes can now be buit in the RT zones as well.
There is one strange wrinkle in all of this. Originally the idea was that the size of new single family homes in the RS zones was to be distrained to encourage the retention of older character homes. This restriction is now gone. Strangely though, the same restriction was approved for houses in the RT zones, so that if a heritage home is demolished the City can limit the size of a new house. You could argue that this restriction should also apply in the RS single family zones that are losing 1,000 single family homes annually and are being replaced by larger single family homes with no rental accommodation available to the local market.
Every. Single. Reviewer. Slams every single phone with no headphone jack and manufacturers just aren’t listening.
You know the drill by now. In a review (or preview) of (e.g.) the (new) Pixel 2 or Essential phone or iPhone 7/8/X or HTC U11, the reviewer says something like: “Sadly” or ‘Unfortunately” or even “Unforgivably”, in the context of there being no 3.5mm headphone/audio jack. I have yet to see a single reviewer or commenter exclaiming “Hooray, the jack has gone”.
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Every. Single. Reviewer. Slams every single phone with no headphone jack and manufacturers just aren’t listening.
You know the drill by now. In a review (or preview) of (e.g.) the (new) Pixel 2 or Essential phone or iPhone 7/8/X or HTC U11, the reviewer says something like: “Sadly” or ‘Unfortunately” or even “Unforgivably”, in the context of there being no 3.5mm headphone/audio jack. I have yet to see a single reviewer or commenter exclaiming “Hooray, the jack has gone”.
