Lack of reliable service from plumbers, HVAC, appliance repair people. There are many people available but the quality and consistency of service is highly variable and chances of getting ripped off are high if you don't do your due diligence. I wish there was more standardization in these services where I don't have to worry about getting ripped off and can expect a decent quality of service without spending too much time on looking up vendors, reading reviews etc. If I want get a leaky washer fixed I don't want to spend my entire weekend to try to figure out if it can be DIY or not. I should just be able to call a reliable service, pay a reasonable price and get if fixed.
So many of these contractors have zero comms skills or infra because they focus on the work and not basic customer relations.
My personal frustration: (0) have someone answer the phone, (1) tell me when are you coming, and (2) be there. I suspect they all have a family member with QB and an answering machine as their whole back office.
Someone should set up simple SaaS to do automated appointment slots, schedule updates to customers, and billing. Charge $1 per slot. Sign up all the contractors.
> Someone should set up simple SaaS to do automated appointment slots, schedule updates to customers, and billing. Charge $1 per slot. Sign up all the contractors.
This is going to end up bad for the contractors. Just look how Uber Eats et al robbed restaurant owners from the profitability of their businesses.
My old business partner started a small company and built software and worked directly with small contractors to do exactly this. They seriously don’t care and don’t see a need for it.
The real problem is a lot of these contractors and subcontractors are running micro businesses—with just a person or two involved—and it’s usually independent subs all the way down. But they don’t treat it as a business—it’s just work. It’s how they earn a living. They don’t want to be businesses. The ones who care and think of it like a business are night-and-day different.
According the the footer in my receipt email the last electrician I used used Housecall Pro (https://www.housecallpro.com/) as their back office. It worked really well, I got SMS reminders about when they were on the way and even texted them a video explaining what I needed done so got an accurate estimate before anyone showed up. Now that I think about it I have no idea if the dispatcher I texted with was an employee of the electrician or this company, but I guess I don’t care.
Having worked on this the realization came that the problem isn't one that can be solved with software. There are a million solutions that in theory should work, if that were the case. The problem is a large percentage of people who work in the trades are flaky. This is not something that the SV crowd can understand. They don't want to be more efficient. They know their jobs can't ever be outsourced. They want to work when they want to work and to be at the bar or on their boat if weather permits.
Larry David’s new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm has an episode where he highlights exactly this problem and comes up with a way to fix it. He calls it House Husband where someone who knows a little about everything can come and check to see if the repair being offered is legit.
Did you watch the episode through? Slight spoilers so stop reading here if you haven't watched the new season. Leon ended up causing an inconvenience for everyone as the the services he negotiated in place of his clients in the end was done poorly xD.
Have a friend who works in managing properties or insurance. Call your house insurance agent and ask who they would call to fix a leaky pipe or whatever it may be.
I have spent the last year sorting a number of repairs that involved plumbing, drywall, paint, and trim to walls, floors, and ceilings to repair damage. In every case, I’ve had to ask for things to be done 2 or 3 times at a minimum just to get things done right and look the way they did before the damage occurred and the work began. Not once has the job ever been done correctly the first time I’m asked to take a look and sign off on completion. I feel I’ve only been able to leverage such refusal because I’ve been able to refuse to write a check (or asked my insurance company to do the same) until the work was right. I’m always told I’m wrong when I call attention to something, and I’ve even had to track down the original builder for records and materials to prove I was correct. And that’s excluding when the workers carelessly cause more damage by doing things wrong, making shitty cuts, doing poor work on drywall mud and corners, carelessly paint edges onto opposing surfaces with different colors, or, you know, split my granite countertop in two.
So, I worked at a startup that specifically tried to work on this issue.
It ended up failing. You know why? People were cheap. They didn’t care at all about the quality of service until after the job was done and they paid bottom dollar.
People are incredibly price sensitive. If there’s a service that is 1% cheaper, they’ll go with that even if it causes 10x as many headaches. The reason? Money is obvious but luck isn’t.
It’s only when you get into business scale of stuff that do people care about quality. For most people - they’re shopping once a year for some handyman service. In those cases, they’ll do whatever they can to get the lowest promised rate upfront. This means they’ll go with untested folks as long as they’re cheap.
Truly, I think there is a way to have both cheap and good but it’s just not in the best interests of a capitalist. If you’re good, you raise your prices as high as possible. You don’t need to compete with shitty - you’re inherently better and thus feel you can charge more. Your clients will feel the same. But I think your clients aren’t likely typical homeowners in those cases. Maybe it’s commercial.
I've felt that this could be a place where unions and/or guilds have a role. If I hire a union worker then the union guarantees that the person shows up and does quality work. If that doesn't happen then the union is held legally and financially responsible. In this world I would be happy to pay a premium for a union worker.
Reliable professionals for just about anything. There's a ton of stuff I'd happily leave to others at a premium price, if I could only rest assured that they'd do it properly. I simply don't know where to look.
Couldn't agree more. Services like thumbtack and yelp seem to try to get you in the direction of good contractors, but the signal to noise is incredibly high. There seem to be very few reputational penalties for poor performance.
Childcare, housing, climate change, the usual. I'm sort of joking, sort of not. The first two affect 99% of my day to day, the last only when I will run out of water or there's a fire nearby.
Edit: in the childcare and education side, something more informative than Greatschools. I know some neighborhood schools that have been gentrified and test scores have gone up, but it's still the same teachers, admin, and available resources. The ratings aren't a great signal. Things like how well resourced the district is for IEPs would be super useful as a parent.
Edit 2: tie in something better than Greatschools with a search engine for preschools, after school programs, and the rest, and you would have a compelling product. The service would be to get your kid on the wait-list for the places you want them to attend :)
Private schools. I went through a Challenger School in the US in the 80's, and that was pretty good. Specifically, they taught traditional phonics when California went to some ridiculous, untested nonsense (i.e., whole word method) because education academics have/had too much power to arbitrarily break education approaches and standards. Interestingly, the catchy "Hooked on Phonics" was a symptom of the widespread problem of the educational system failing students, not the students failing the system.
Climate change. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). I frown on chemical and mechanical means because they can't scale inherently and would be very expensive. Farming oceanic life is likely the main answer to it, such as GM kelp or phytoplankton.
From your description, it seems like what would really help is better policies and approach to public schools. Assuming that private schools would tend to pick better educational approaches seems flawed to me.
That's not how the real world works, only an idealized one. And not all public or private schools are the same. In the US, private schools were motivated (but not forced) to adopt better approaches because they were often competing with widely-available free public schools. Some public schools were being ruined by inept education bureaucrats, so wealthier parents moved their kids into better private ones. This is because some states and school districts were overriding the wishes of the parents, so the said wealthier ones did was was easiest: change schools. This created a two-tiered system in some areas where public schools got worse because they lost money per student as students left, had to cut budgets and good teachers, and concentrated poor and inner city students within underfunded, failing school districts. There are good public schools in some areas and there are probably plenty of horrible private schools too. It's my experience in the US that the best private schools tend to be better than the best public schools because of the extreme differences in resources.
Where I come from is Almaden Valley of San Jose and Palo Alto, so YMMV depending on where you are. Barely-adequate public schooling doesn't work for my family. Many moons ago, the high school I attended was rich af and an overachiever mecca because of high property taxes and extreme property values. There are also excellent private schools, including some of the more specialized ones for higher gifted and genius kids that regular schools hold back.
In other countries like Finland, they have it right compared to US education system the genius W contributed to breaking: homework has no value, teaching answers to excessive standardized tests (NCLBA) has little value, and grading teachers on immediate performance of said standardized tests has little value.
To solve this problem of finding good schools, I believe word-of-mouth advice from more successful folks is more valuable than any website filled with sour grapes or unverifiable claims made by random, anonymous people. It also can be a problem that better areas tend to have better schools, so no website will be able to find what doesn't currently exist in low population or not-as-nice areas.
How do you define success in a short term timescale to steer any adjustments though? If the goal is to educate children to become successful adults you have at least a 15-20 year time horizon. By the time you know if the methodologies are working or not, it has probably changed 3 or 4 times and most of the teachers have moved on, maybe if you're lucky there's an institutional "agenda" for lack of a better term that hasn't moved too far off course. And that's assuming that no external forces change in the intervening years.
it's a slow process but examples of better schooling do exist. it takes research and the willingness to look beyond your local region.
the problem has multiple aspects. funding is one, management another, actual teaching methodologies yet another. for all of those examples can be found. not everything is directly applicable and it takes some experimentation.
but a part of the problem is also the definition of success. the goalpost on that keeps changing too.
for adults to be successful the environment needs to be supportive too.
aren't there studies that show that children from poor families are less successful despite good schooling? so if we want children to be successful we also need to eliminate poverty. these things go hand in hand. and i suspect that some attempts at better schooling fail because other aspects like this are not being addressed.
It's that word of mouth that I want to know! I agree that something Yelp-like isn't going to be useful. I just don't see a way of doing this successfully unless the government mandated surveys, or some other compulsory mechanism.
Not being on social media at all, I’m almost amused about the right wing comment. I don’t see that at all unless I read like nypost. It is a Facebook thing?
I'm a pinko left wing commie, and so are all my friends, followers, and people I follow. You can't get a purer bubble! But, my friends post things like "you won't believe what X said on OANN the other day. OUTRAGE!" So I just log off for a week. It's a just a property of human beings plus the engagement algorithms.
Problem of unjust societies. My kid will be a multimillionaire in his twenties without a single day of work while his equally capable peers will enface a life of limited opportunity because the best they can do is to work their ass off to pay rent. It is structural and it needs to change.
A truly liberal idea could be to reset the "score" when the game is over. Try to be the best you can and earn as much as you can - when you die, most of your wealth flows back into a large pond to the benefit of all.
Personally, I think inheritance is the ultimate expression of success = luck and should be capped hard with the remainder flowing back into support funds for things that help re-balance opportunities. However, most people I've brought this up with find the idea completely repulsive - the idea of "I want my kids to get the fruits of my labor" seems pretty ingrained.
if you do this , rich people will just blow their wealth since they know their kids cant get it or they will stop working hard to create more wealth and that may inhibit new inventions etc. I know rent seeking exists but communism is not the solution my friend.
1. You're heavily disincentivizing people from doing their most to earn more money. Assuming you buy into capitalism in the first place (which I do), the result of this is generally worse for society. Less new inventions, less new medicines, less new technologies, etc.
2. The second problem is more philosophical, but... what right does society have to take away someone's property, which they presumably worked hard for? People often work hard to give to their children (hence point 1 above), what makes you think it's a legitimate use of the force of government to take everything from them? Most people think it's fairly unfair.
Capitalism does a lot to kill motivation on the right things. No matter how hard I work, I will never make as much money as some guy who sells cosmetics on Instagram. In Malaysia, we have architects quitting their jobs to become bakers, lawyers quitting to sell noodles.
There's also the question on whether inventions, medicine, technology are what we should be optimizing for? Depression and mental health are high despite all this, probably worse in wealthier countries than poorer ones.
The real cost to inequality is that it correlates with political polarization. Countries that are more equal tend to have politics that agree on more things. Political instability is one problem, but it also leads to distrust of the government, leading to the anti-police and anti-vaccine movements we've been seeing lately.
How do you know what the "right things" are without markets? If architects are quitting their jobs to become bakers, it's because society values the baker more than the architect and therefore the person can make more as a baker. If enough architects quit, you will see the incentives switch and more and more people will begin training to become architects.
>There's also the question on whether inventions, medicine, technology are what we should be optimizing for?
Only the whole economy can accurately decide what we should optimize for. If you try to centrally plan an economy, it will fail because you remove pricing from the equation which is a signal to where resources should be allocated. For things that may not have a current market, this is what privately funded research and charities should be used for.
>The real cost to inequality is that it correlates with political polarization
This is only an issue because for some reason we have decided we need these huge government bureaucracies to run our day to day lives. Without this, peoples politics wouldn't matter. As for the anti-police movement's, this is manly due to people starting to realize the only thing the police protect is the State. The anti-vaccine movement hasn't grown. The government and the media have changed the definition of anti-vaccine. If you don't believe the government should or has the right to implement vaccine mandates on the populace you are anti-vaccine. If you aren't sure there is evidence the vaccine slows the spread of COVID, you are anti-vaccine. So basically the government and the media have labeled anyone who is unsure about this specific vaccine to be the same as the person who believes essential oils will heal everything and that vaccines in general cause autism.
The biggest obstacle IMO is that inheritance taxes are unpopular. We already tax very large inheritances (above $5M), but I don't think there is an appetite for stepping that top bracket up to 100%.
Wealth tax still seems highly unpopular in the general public, not to mention on HN. I think the average user here is more interested in bringing home FAANG salaries than solving the wealth gap.
> Wealth tax still seems highly unpopular in the general public, not to mention on HN. I think the average user here is more interested in bringing home FAANG salaries than solving the wealth gap.
I’m more interested in making the existing set of taxes more equitable and less favorable to capital (extending equal taxation to capital income as labor income) than adding additional layers of complexity to the tax system.
When people say 'wealth tax' they usually are thinking add up all your assets and pay some percentage of that each year. There are quite a lot of practical problems with that.
Yet most Americans have almost all of their wealth inside of their home and they pay a tax on it every year. Hmmm, interesting. It's almost like we made a system for this and made it easy for people to pay this tax... It's almost like there's ways to tax things easily and effectively... Hmm!!! Even for assets which can change dramatically in price every year like houses do! How does it work?!
The practical problems are all very solvable. Again - this is just propaganda the rich sell into the minds of the masses to avoid taxation further. Don't buy into it. And stop spreading it.
Poor availability of introductory learning materials for grad-level study. Undergrad level stuff is pretty well covered by whatever MOOC you can imagine. But often for more advanced topics there is a large gap between what you know after an undergrad degree and what existing learning materials (if any exist) assume you know. Sometimes you just have to bang your head against papers until your brain melds with the concepts.
It’s understandable why this is. Writing introductory textbooks in your area of study is not prestigious work valued by your peers, takes a huge amount of time, and rarely makes money.
Perhaps the learning materials do exist, but there is no easy way to divine their existence. Expert-curated learning tracks might be valuable here. I’ll tell you what is not valuable, though: giant lists of “learning resources” in a github README that have no particular relation or sorting order and that the author/maintainer has never personally read.
Perhaps the struggle is necessary for learning. I’ll never forget those times my mind finally makes by itself the leap to understanding, although I constantly forget whatever smoothed-down introductory learning material I have consumed in the past. Perhaps the solution is simply to hire a grad student for 1:1 tutoring at $50-$100/hr.
It's a values thing, partially. Instead of publish or perish purely on research, publish or perish value to industry, academia, and knowledge. Seems like there needs to be a "LinkedIn" for grad/postgrad that can present such academic CV items coherently.
I agree that competent, thoughtful textbooks combined with amazing lecturers/TAs/peers are needed to transfer knowledge.
One thing that bothers me and still hasn't been solved is the ergonomics of everyday computing. I don't care if people have Herman Miller chairs and use ergonomic keyboards, and an expensive mouse. You're still sitting on a chair which will kill your back. I've tried standing desks, but never liked standing.
As for phones/tablets; I've only ever used them as consumption devices and no 'deep work' gets done on them like you would with a desktop PC. My strategy is to take regular breaks from the PC and stand up every 8 minutes and walk around to straighten my back, but it doesn't have to be that way. I just want to be plugged in for hours like I could do in my twenties. Solve that!
As of others have mentioned here, VR solves a lot of these problems. E.g.
> [VR], on the other hand, gives you the ability to move windows or even your entire workspace around at will, allowing you to change positions and achieve more ergonomic working stances throughout the day. You can even experiment with supine computing without purchasing any expensive desk setups.
VR computing also allows you to walk while computing (using an "AR mode" supported by passthrough front facing cameras).[1]
I suspect VR workstations will help with this. Many ergonomic constraints come from ease of mounting monitors at eye level. With VR this problem no longer exists. You can be in any position you want - lying down, standing, sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, etc. - and as long as you can type with separated keyboard halves for each hand you will be productive.
Perhaps we should not be chasing the One True Ergonomic Body Position but should instead rotate through various positions during the day.
I stayed away from VR for the past eight years but picked up an oculus quest 2 for $180 on craigslist the other day. Other than the mandatory facebook integration (hopefully a thriving jailbreak/homebrew ecosystem pops up) I am blown away that something of this quality can be found for so little. VR computers are coming and I would happily pay a few thousand dollars for something that can replace my desk, chair, monitors, microphone, headphones, computer, and all the other knick-knacks necessary for those to work together. I think things have now reached the level where they can authentically compete with a real-world workstation, at the high end. Certainly they must be customized for your head/face shape and eye positions.
Also, keyboards need to be split apart and attached to a chair like the DataHand keyboard (without the connecting board) of years ago. Typing on a single thing in front of you is asking for body wear and tear.
> I've tried standing desks, but never liked standing.
This is why adjustable standing desks are important. It's not good to be standing all day either. The best approach is changing your position between sitting and standing throughout the day, with frequent breaks.
Improved human <-> animal communications at scale.
Given the state of machine learning with unstructured audio data, machine translation, and robotics, I would have hoped for better methods to communicate with wild animals, cattle and our pets by now.
Fix the economy, make it more fair. Make it so that the ones at the far end of the supply chain get the same chance of building a good business as the ones sitting closer to the end customer. Make it so that honest, hard work gets rewarded more than gaming the system.
This is more important than apps that make $WHATEVER more convenient by an infinitesimal amount.
But, probably not the kind of problem that you wanted to hear about.
Never going to happen because most people bought the idea that "greed fixes everything with magic." The policy prescriptions are obvious but unpopular. Instead, misery for most will continue to increase while the first trillionaires are made. Homelessness will skyrocket and the earnings of unskilled labor will fall through the floor. No amount of edumacation and retraining can turn everyone who loses a job into a software engineer or a solar electrician.
Getting scans and tests from hospital. In the UK you can wait weeks just to get a blood test.
Looking to the future, I'd like to see a full body scanner that you lie down in and it can diagnose the vast majority of ailments. See it has a combined x-ray/CT scanner. Sounds like science fiction? Would return instant results.
Some easy ones right off the bat: online extremism, public transit, housing, access to healthcare, chronic disease treatment.
Online dating is pretty rough. I need a company to get extremely serious about desktop Linux and charge me $100/yr for something that actually works. Yes. It’s okay to charge for copyleft software.
The “hook” is the worst part. It’s so hard to start a conversation from nothing and get it to stick in a meaningful way. People like to joke that those who treat Twitter like a dating app are misusing it, but I think it’s a better analog for real world dating than most things.
Once you build a sufficiently big group of mutuals on Twitter and get to know them a little bit without the pressure of relationship expectations, sparks seem to happen so much more naturally and organically just as they might in a workplace or school setting.
I don’t have much hope for online dating in its current form unless it gets to a level of AI invasiveness like in that one Black Mirror episode. Gatling gun dating just isn’t fun or effective.
Strongly agree. Online dating can feel super unnatural & somewhat demeaning compared to organic convos, the typical meat market analogy seems apt.
Funnily enough, I threw together a landing page a couple of days ago [1] to run Google Ads and gauge whether there's wider interest in a solution that would avoid you having to come up with a "hook" + reinvigorate those sparks you mention.
The thought so far is that you'd fill out a pretty invasive character assessment that would be analysed by AI + professional matchmakers to set up one date a month for you with another user (who you won't see or speak to until you actually meet in person).
Fair tax. I live in a country where persons must pay high tax. But companies (big) are doing all sorts of "tricks" and pay zero.
I have no problems paying tax myself and have huge benefit from that kind of system (health care).
But it is infuriating to see huge corps paying zero year after year. So somehow it should be easy to spot such companies and then avoid them.
Education, basic research, and infrastructure were the fuels that propelled our success until the 70s.
We had these things up until Nixon and Reagan realized they could attack those institutions for short term gain, redirecting the funds to the 1% and calling it trickle down.
Too many regulations. There are basically none in computing compared to everything else, which means that all it takes to do something new is a Hacker with an obsession.
The Covid Vax was sent to the first round of testing before the disease showed up in the US. If we all the tests weren't legally required, many people wouldn't have died.
More than 900.000 dead. 2977 died on 9/11, so this delay is more 100 times worse.
There's probably just too many rules these days. I wonder how many of those examples would have been slowed down by bureaucratic regulations these days.
Not just America, but the world has shown just how fast it can move in the last two years. We went from new virus causing a pandemic to over 60% of the world having at least one dose of a vaccine in 24 months. Far faster than anyone thought possible.
Yeah, that's the example I was going to give. The development, testing, production, and distribution of multiple effective vaccines was a demonstration of how we can still go fast.
I don't like working from home, but my day mostly consists of being on calls/video chats and discussing a lot of information that shouldn't be overheard by others. I want a private office option that doesn't cost a thousand dollars a month and I don't need all the extras of a co-working space like WeWork.
The first can be improved by replacing the first past the post system and removing gerrymandering. Even better have at least 5 political parties and a parliamentary system.
The second can be improved by eliminating anonymous speech accounts. It doesn't have to be visibly tied to your legal name. But Socrates was right. Without accountability people will immediately do awful things.
Neil Stephenson had a great idea in "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", a fix. Online accounts had blockchain identities.
But then again people will probably never stop feeding trolls and take into account other people's posting history. Nor will online forums come down as hard as they need to on abuse.
It was crazy to see how quickly we "solved" this problem during COVID, if only temporarily. I just wish to see more collective action to solve this on a more permanent basis. I'm partial to WFH plus moving away from car-dependence in North American towns and cities.
Otosclerosis. It causes conductive hearing loss, affects 10% of the population. Its essentially abnormal bone turnover inside the ear (Stapes) that becomes fixated leading to conductive hearing loss and eventually full deafness in some cases.
The current solution is to remove the diseased bone and fitting a prosthesis, it has risks and hearing doesn't always return to normal.
I always wondered why this can't be fixed using ear drops to administer Biophosphonates in the effected ear for a non invasive solution. In terms of 'lossening' an already fixated Stapes, why not a solution that is found to effectively dissolve the abnormal bone together with Biophosphonates.
It could be administered every so often to ensure minimal progression.
I lost almost half of my hearing due to otosclerosis and had an operation on my right ear that changed almost nothing, now it's worse. I wasn't aware that we are such a large group.
Be aware that I haven't done this before, but I imagine it would go like this:
1. Figure out which field of science you are interested in
2. Find a couple of universities that teach this field of science or you think have someone specialising in that on staff
3. Go through their list of researchers
4. Pick one out and send them an email. Or if you cannot find a mail address, send an old school letter to the university
Sorry for the somewhat late reply, I only check on my comments every so often!
As for whether or not they would want to help you out, it never hurts to try. Even if that particular researcher can't, he might be able to refer you to someone who can or depending on the scope of the research hook you up with a student in need of a thesis / project etc.
Academics often are in need of funding, if your idea has merit then I am sure you will he able to find someone that will research for you fairly quickly.
Beep (YC S14) did this and made a gorgeous, inexpensive volume dial that lives on top of your speakers and speaks wifi. Unfortunately the company shut down but it was great while it lasted.
It looks like there isn’t market demand for this without the associated speaker business or intelligent assistant.
This one is kind of funny because the speed of sound makes sparse speakers tricky if you’re moving around. It can sound weird.
If you’ve ever seen (and some milliseconds later heard) someone dribbling a basketball at the other end of a long quiet street you’ll know what I mean.
I opted for a low-power FM transmitter fed by the music player daemon (mpd). Zero latency, always synchronized, works with any stereo receiver I want, plenty of clients to choose from (web-based, mobile, etc.) to control the mpd.
City to city high speed railway transit, so more railways. Last I checked, it would take me 24 hours to travel from Birmingham, Alabama to Chicago. It would route me through the northeast. Bham is almost due south of Chicago.
- what’s the demand for travel from Birmingham to Chicago?
- what’s the ecological cost of laying rail from Birmingham straight north?
We could subsidize a lot of plane flights / busses on existing highway infrastructure before it makes sense to lay down rail, even between Birmingham and Nashville.
And it looks like Birmingham > Nashville is a < 3 hour car ride. So would most people want to drive to a train station, wait at the train, then take the train 1.5 hours (assuming high speed at 140 mph) then deal with last mile transit / car rental in Nashville?
Never mind that train route runs right through Franklin, which has insane property costs and I can imagine NIMBY-ism going on, so you’d have to route around it.
The cost for a high speed rail is estimated at $154 million per mile, which would be $30 BN to build the segment between Birmingham and Nashville.
Then it’s a billion dollar soft target, so security and terrorism are a concern, especially being the first example of high speed rail in middle America. It would take one extremist with a rifle to shut it down / reduce ridership. They wouldn’t even have to hit anyone, just shoot at it as it went past one of the many fields.
And at 30 BN, you won’t ever see the ROI, and it would require federal funding - which many would ask why someone in Montana should pay for rail transport in between Birmingham and Nashville, and it would probably die before funded. The government spends $315 Million to subsidize small airports around the country per year, which may be a more effective use of tax payer dollars.
All that said, I understand why you want someone to solve this problem - it would open up all sorts of towns for lower cost of living in Nashville / surrounding cities. Especially if it was subsidized for riders. If the hyper loop becomes a thing, I’ll be excited. I also understand there are people who just won’t get on planes.
cost is a good point, i didn't know that. maybe a realistic goal would be a direct train to chicago from birmingham. it doesn't have to be high speed. i just looked it up again, and it would take 40 hours. the route would go through atlanta to virginia and then it heads towards illinois.
there is currently no amtrak from birmingham to nashville. the only way is via bus. obviously the south is very car-centric but that's a legacy of the infrastructure we built in the past. i don't see why we can't try to build infrastructure with a bigger emphasis on better public transit (primarily trains) rather than automobiles, so we can have that legacy in the future.
idk if the terrorist concern is a strong argument? you could make the same argument against planes. and how would an extremist with a rifle shut down a train? what is stopping them from doing that on a backed up, slow moving interstate highway, today? that seems easier to hit than a high speed train. have you ever shot a gun at a moving target? extremists with rifles are already, in 2022, a bigger risk in public spaces like churches and restaurants and malls and town squares and schools.
Cleaning and organizing the house. Decluttering, identifying the right place for all our stuff, keeping it here. Scrubbing, wiping surfaces. Washing, folding, putting away laundry. Sweeping and vacuuming floors. Cleaning and organizing the yard. Pulling weeds, avoiding them in the first place. Pruning and maintaining plants. Planning, building, and maintaining landscape elements. Collecting and disposing yard waste. Cleaning gutters. Cooking. Cleaning the dishes. Deciding what to cook for dinner given what's in the fridge and pantry. Meal planning
THIS. This is what HomeJoy was supposed to be. Million dollar lawyers who don't understand business law??? How does that work??? During "IT" HomeJoy could have really made it's mark and cemented it's place amongst the SuperZips.
Like this? In most cases, the queues and prompts are in place because the majority of callers really don't need to talk to a human and waste support's time with very simple tasks.
Honestly , I'm surprised that there hasn't been any breakthroughs on a problem that affects half of the world population.
We are even tackling aging but no one has bothered to massively invest in researching this and coming up with a potential cure? One could argue that it's not as important as deadly diseases but I would say the ROI could be phenomenal..
Admittingly I have no medical or scientific background so perhaps there is a good reason for this that I am not aware of.
I'm guessing if I said, "I would like a device to cook me dinner," your response would be "The better solution is eliminating the need to cook anything," and I'd be eating out of some NASA-approved squeeze tube or eating TV dinners for the rest of my life.
As I am a normal human, no, the answer is a device that actually organizes and folds laundry when I dump it into a pile out of the dryer.
there is no need to fold clothes. a lot of clothes can be left hanging if you have enough space, or an efficient way to do that. i hang up clothes to dry on regular coat hangers, and ideally i'd just move them into a hanging closet. no need to take them down and fold. hanging clothes are also easier to search through to pick what you want to wear.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but Last FM gives you decent recommendations based on your listening habits, and all you need is a player that supports sending data to it.
Making a truly squirrel proof bird feeder, that also lets slightly larger birds, such as robins, access the food.
This is surprisingly difficult to find, and many squirrel proof feeders on Amazon actually get destroyed by squirrels in no time. Those that can resist the squirrel assaults have a cage that's too narrow for robins to get inside.
After being given a bird feeder as a gift, I went down a rabbit hole.
And it was just the feeder, btw. So nothing else.
Well, with a feeder you need to put it somewhere. Tried trees. It was a squirrel feeder.
Then I got a pole for the middle of my yard, away from all high objects a squirrel could jump from. Quickly became a squirrel feeder, as they can climb the pole. Looked at greasing the pole, laying out with a BB gun, and other options, but settled on a metal cone below the feeder.
The squirrels in my neighborhood have bad short term memory, so they will see the feeder, make the association with food, start to climb the pole, get under the cone, and then sit there for a couple of seconds before forgetting their mission.
I’ve had squirrels try to reach to the exterior of the cone, but it’s not stable, so as soon as they put weight on it they fall.
I’ve heard squirrels elsewhere are smarter than this system (not sure how - team work?) but here they can’t figure it out.
All that said, the “gift” of the bird feeder lead to $100 in purchases, regular seed refills, and hours of research. But I ended up with birds near my office window, so that’s nice.*
6/10 would receive again.
Feeder pole: Your friend has shared a link to a Home Depot product they think you would be interested in seeing.
* in searching my Amazon order history to find the products I got, I realized we also had a ton of bird strikes into our windows, to the point that I had to get clings to go on the windows. These have been mostly effective in stopping birds from hitting the house.
Same here, but with hemisphere of clear plastic. I still put a cage over the sunflower seeds because otherwise the parakeets (yes they are now common in the UK) sit on it all day and would rather fight off other birds, including other parakeets, than eat.
My mom lived in Paradise CA and had this problem. Anything birds can manipulate, most squirrels can too, except they can't literally fly or peck. She tried 5 different feeder designs and the squirrels all got to them.
One solution is cage suet feeders. Squirrels can't peck into them.
Another is throwing out enough seed / feed on the ground over a large enough area so that a variety of critters can get access. Crows, finches, jays, wild turkeys, and deer would feed at the same time.
Yet another solution is to place a tree feeder on top of a greased pole away from trees so squirrels can't jump down to it or climb up it.
Bird baths or other fresh water sources that are kept from producing mosquitoes larva are also good.
The other critters of concern in the area were red foxes, vultures, hawks, and black bear.
How could everybody who wants self owned real estate actually get real estate.
I guess it's usually an infrastructure problem.
Plots are cheap in locations with bad infrastructure so the solution could also be to get infrastructure wherever you want.
Not having to fill out the same information every time I visit a new healthcare provider. They should just have some sort of centralized profile I can give them access to for my information.
Reading the piece the other day about Kansas giving away free property got me to wondering what it takes to make "affordable housing" worth "unpopular location".
C++ programmer here. I have a class that does something, so a header and a source file. I add some words as a primer on why the class exists, and the magic neural net adds comments in the header as to what the member variables are, and what the methods do.
I'd be really curious to see if the output is comprehensible and informative. There's a huge training corpus for this do I'd assume this would work.
Not all code can be self-documenting, especially optimized algorithms and complex operations. Comments serve to add requisite context and clarification that code alone cannot provide. Simply regurgitating the obvious in comments is a waste.
2. not all decisions can be revealed in code itself. (for example, adding a delay to workaround a hardware bug.)
3. the biggest part missing from code documentation is the big picture document, not really the code level document. even you know what a class/function is, you don't know how it is used in the entire project, its life cycle, etc.
because they didn't have any moral education. that is the missing component.
science and arts is not enough. we also need to learn to care for each other, to be kind, generous, not hurtful, treat others with love and respect and many more virtues...
