When I was ten, my mum questioned whether my sister and myself were 'too old for LEGO'. In Woolworths we had to reassure her that Set 376-2 Town House with Garden was what we wanted as it came with lots of lovely red bricks that we 'needed'. To be honest, at the time, I thought my mum was right, and that we were getting too old for LEGO, but we had sunk costs...
For us, LEGO was all about ingenuity, improvisation and imagination. We would build a set once, with the alternate back-of-the-box design, without the instructions. Then the real fun would begin, as the new set went in with the bricks we had.
At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
Nowadays kids have a ridiculous abundance of LEGO but where is the ingenuity and imagination? Or even the play time? With tablets, phones, video games and so much else, it seems that the set gets built as per the instructions and that is it, job done. The play hasn't even really started.
My parents hosted dinner parties, as was the custom at the time, when restaurants were rare. They quite liked to have our current creations on show, in a low-key way. That is how adults should do LEGO, proud of their kids' creations.
None of our LEGO had a market value, however, every brick had utility and colour value within our LEGO world. We had other things for collecting, even stamps, and they notionally had value.
Hence I am not sure what is going on with people having $200k LEGO collections. That level of abundance just isn't about play, and certainly not for kids. I have no sympathy for the guy, and although the loss is painful, at least he has a chance to grow up a bit!
P.S. Corporate LEGO also ruined it by promoting the whole AFOL thing, but the success of the company has been astounding, considering the product is plastic waste.
You played with legos as a kid. Congratulations, so did lots of other kids at the time, and so do kids right now. Nothing has actually changed. Legos are still sold in a box with instructions, just like they were 20 years ago and 40 years ago and so on and so forth.
The idea that adults can't play with or enjoy legos is, well, genuinely sad, as in, it invokes the emotion of sadness. Adults are allowed to have fun and play games, whether that be building race cars out of metal or out of lego or any other activity they find joy in.
> At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
I genuinely wish you had a better childhood. Maybe you would have grown up into a person who can feel empathy for others.
The toy market is under continual change and every child is borne into the context and culture of their era.
There is also opportunity cost. Had I listened to my mother on that fateful day in Woolworths, we could have moved ten foot one way to have bought ourselves sports gear. Since neither my sister or myself can catch a ball, maybe we should have got into badminton, table tennis or football. But we denied ourselves that opportunity because we bought yet more LEGO.
Things were different in period in the USA, particularly for middle class kids, where the abundance of toys was entirely different. My American counterparts of the period had 10x the toys we had. Not jealous, just saying.
As an outsider looking in on American culture in general, there is too much infantilisation going on for my liking. Adults going to Disneyland with no kids in tow, adults watching MARVEL movies with no kids in tow, adults eating McDonalds, adults eating cereal with cartoon characters on the box, adults drinking Coca Cola and so on. Even the car culture is somewhat infantile.
Why has American gone the wrong way, to retreat into a nine-year-old 'inner America'?
Going back a bit, the finest literature came out of the USA, not yet more infantile cruft. Something is amiss.
We have been here before. After WW2, plenty of men returned to retreat into their inner nine year old selves, which kept model trains going for a while after the kids lost interest. But the adults changed the hobby from playing trains to this micro-realistic world with running trains becoming a rarity, rather than what it was all about. This was their coping mechanism, and I understand that.
I put dl lists in a grid with no divs needed. As MDN says, div is the last resort, invariably there is something better, and nowadays that is grid styling.
New to me is multiple dd's.
For legacy layouts littered with divs and classes, display: contents helps get rid of the div wrappers, promoting whatever is wrapped.
Even with disclosure elements there are ways to avoid div wrappers using the pseudo element for everything enclosed by the details element apart from the summary element.
Another problem with the UK retail scene is the charity shop, of all things.
It is hard to hate the charity shop as they are Mother Theresa and Bob Geldof in retail form, feeding the starving of Africa (name me one) and bringing us one step nearer to curing cancer (as if).
But, after a while, the charity tends to perpetuate the problems that it seeks to solve. So you have what amounts to a business that has volunteers rather than paid staff (forget about minimum wage), the electricity bill is at a special rate and even the products come for free, from house clearances and people just getting rid of their 'empty gifts of capitalism' (plastic trash).
The real hustle is with rent and business rates. Rent and rates gets paid but at a fraction of the cost. If the landlord kept the place empty then he would have to foot the rates bill, but get that charity shop in and the problem goes away. The landlord can then count on the value of his property going up because they don't make land any more and all capital ends up hoisting up property values, even if the crumbling 'property' was paid for aeons ago and is best demolished.
What you have with a toy shop is specialist retail, where customers have expectations of service. The staff should know the availability of every product, stock levels and much else. It is not 'pile it high' as per the Toys R Us model.
I worked in specialist retail and for a boss that despised charity shops. We were in a back alley, with a fraction of the footfall. Anyone visiting the town would see the usual row of useless charity shops but not our shop. We had bills to pay and they didn't. It was unfair.
Nowadays the High Street doesn't just have the charity shop scams going on. There is the joy of money laundering. Imagine you have a fine cannabis operation going on and you are bringing in tens of thousands a week. What do you do with that money? How do you convert it to property?
This is where the nail bar comes in to play. Or the 'barbers'. Or the 'vape shop'. Hire your immigrant labour to sell nothing all day, and you can put through all the money you want.
Then we have the Wetherspoons pub, where they don't really make money from beer, the idea is to build a property portfolio. Another hustle.
Then there are the naive hopefuls. Personally I would love to own a little shop that sold all my favourite toys that I was denied as a kid, so that would mean train sets. Or maybe I would love to own a little cafe that sells the healthiest food in town. With some lottery winnings or an inheritance, I could dive in, hire my best friends and have the grand opening.
Narcissism would mean that all the warning signs would be ignored. Pride would mean that I would be in it until the house was mortgaged three times over, with half the suppliers demanding payment up front. Every day would be praying for rain, as in sales. I would be complaining and blaming the usual suspects such as the jungle store.
There are many, many other hustles and it sometimes helps to explore a town with someone from 'the other side of the tracks'. Poor people get preyed on in ways you would not believe.
For instance, cigarettes. If you went into one of those convenience stores and wanted a packet of cigarettes, it would cost you a vast fortune, I don't know how much, but probably around £20 nowadays, at a guess. However, for our special friends, they get the counterfeit ones at a ridiculously low price.
If you were to ask for them then the owner would tell you where to go. However, if a special friend were to introduce you to the store owner, then you would be able to buy the £3 or £5 counterfeit items too. You can even pay by card, so long as you are in the club.
A certain poverty mindset keeps people from 'my special world' going back to these convenience stores to buy food and drink items that have no nutritional value apart from calories. It is very sad but you would be amazed at how much money can be made from the seedier side of the High Street.
The problem isn't with this strange underworld, it is with the people in charge. They don't have the 'speakeasy' code words needed to appreciate how it works and they haven't tried to give specialist retail a go. They are probably at a different level of criminality, with the rentier class that are the true parasites of Western society.
The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus.
Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.
The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.
We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.
Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.
There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.
Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?
Maybe. But maybe not.
The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.
There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.
At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.
One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.
I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.
> What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride.
You lost me here. It is too much virtue signalling to bear. Did we also "lose working class pride" when factories became (largely) automated? We did not.
Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it? One that does not sound so weird.
Still, in the case of the robotaxi (or robobus :)), the pride can potentialy be felt by the people who are responsible for their autonomous programming, right?
Though obviously not when they drive into floods en masse. :)
A while ago I worked with a guy that did not put effort into written communication and he was doing the marketing for the company. I would have words with the boss about this and, initially, I struggled to explain why spelling, grammar, punctuation and use of paragraphs was important.
After some thought I was better able to explain the not-so-obvious. It is all about respecting the time of the reader.
Some people don't respect the reader since they think they are important. Notably with the Ep*tein files, we have this clique of wealthy people, with few of them able to string two sentences together. Writing standards were those of an eight year old at best.
Personally I write fairly long form because I don't have ideas that I can express in glorified grunts. However, this LLM stuff is encroaching on my turf, since the likes of the guy I used to struggle with can now churn out better English than I can. That is the problem for those of us from the pre-internet, pre-grammar-checking age when written communication mattered.
My mother was one of those teachers that had questionable qualifications. This was a problem from time to time as different government edicts and local authority changes made teachers effectively reapply for their jobs.
Eventually she did get a degree, albeit with my father writing up most of the assignments, however, I was underwhelmed by this. I felt that it was quite an indulgence for just a piece of paper.
Subject matter does matter. My mother was teaching art which might as well have been craft. What she brought to the class was experience, experience in crafts and experience existing as a money-making artist. She also knew a few people.
Few in academia could match her skill set and there were no complaints. It didn't matter that she was practically illiterate when it came to writing.
The last hold out in the UK was the offices of BAT (British American Tobacco). They had ashtrays, spittoons and untold free cigarettes for their staff to help themselves to.
To spice it up a bit, they had lots of cigarettes to try from developing markets. Sometimes these had extra flavour that appealed to the smoker, so more nicotine and tar.
They had this 70s style going on in the early 2000s, at a time when smoking had been outlawed from enclosed public spaces plus lots of outdoor spaces such as sports grounds and train platforms.
Out of the 70s context, the dedication to normalising smoking in the BAT offices made the place sound like more of a cult. I did not work there myself but I had a friend that did. He didn't smoke once he left the 'cult'.
I worked in weather for TV as a technician and I was lucky enough to work with meteorologists. I thought they were high priests in the church of science, however, I detected a gambling mentality going on.
I was just surprised at how subjective their work was, with differing opinions regarding the big picture depending on whom you asked and what their background was, as in university, whether they had worked for the navy or whether they had worked for the government.
The big surprise of the gambling mentality reminded me of people that dedicate their lives to losing as much money as possible betting on horses. These people know the form, the weather and so much, yet they do their own bets.
It was kind of the same when working out what the weather would be in Springfield tomorrow. Would it just be cloudy or actual rain? That would be a 'bet'.
The next day the observations would come in and the meteorologists would either win or lose their 'bet'. The guy who has been to Springfield and knows the local geography well would have his own reasons for his 'bet', whereas the guy who was more interested in long term storm development would have another rationale for his 'bet'.
Then there would be 'wrong all the time me', able to look at the low level cloud from contrails (which are really huge in some wavelengths on the satellite pictures) to assume rain every day.
Hence climate and weather is highly subjective even if it is highly educated and vastly experienced professionals that are interpreting the data.
There is also the additional issue of computer models constantly chasing global changes. About 10-15 years back I used to talk with folks that worked on weather modeling and they were in a state of frustration in that as soon as they could make models that could work on older data sets to do reasonable predictions, the global weather patterns had change just subtly enough that it made them just kind of average on forward predictions.
This was right before GPU compute started to become a big thing, I do wonder if they now use machine learning models on these to speed up model iteration? I would hope so, but even then there is the human factor as you said. Eventually someone has to make the call on what the data shows and how to present it to the world.
Even if you had some genuine snake oil with every step of the manufacturing process documented, with the product protected by the best anti-tamper technology and legal department, nobody today would buy snake oil. You could make it organic, fair trade and everything, but, due to the snake oil salesmen of times past, selling an adulterated product that contained no snake oil, the market for legitimate snake oil is not exactly massive.
Hence the problem with snake oil is not the product, it is how it has been sold.
There are many other products that are a whisker away from the same fate. For example, olive oil. Can anyone say they have had the pure and unadulterated stuff? There is no way of knowing unless you have pressed your own olives.
It is the same deal with honey. None of that honey in the supermarket could possibly be legitimate, at the price it is at.
I like it how the author says how busy he is and how he finally snatched a few minutes out of this busy life to bring us this edict: don't hijack mouse pointers, or else!
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.
For us, LEGO was all about ingenuity, improvisation and imagination. We would build a set once, with the alternate back-of-the-box design, without the instructions. Then the real fun would begin, as the new set went in with the bricks we had.
At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
Nowadays kids have a ridiculous abundance of LEGO but where is the ingenuity and imagination? Or even the play time? With tablets, phones, video games and so much else, it seems that the set gets built as per the instructions and that is it, job done. The play hasn't even really started.
My parents hosted dinner parties, as was the custom at the time, when restaurants were rare. They quite liked to have our current creations on show, in a low-key way. That is how adults should do LEGO, proud of their kids' creations.
None of our LEGO had a market value, however, every brick had utility and colour value within our LEGO world. We had other things for collecting, even stamps, and they notionally had value.
Hence I am not sure what is going on with people having $200k LEGO collections. That level of abundance just isn't about play, and certainly not for kids. I have no sympathy for the guy, and although the loss is painful, at least he has a chance to grow up a bit!
P.S. Corporate LEGO also ruined it by promoting the whole AFOL thing, but the success of the company has been astounding, considering the product is plastic waste.
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