voluntaryXchange

Just Wondering …

Why are garbage bag sizes measured in gallons?

Does anyone go to the store and think … gee … I put 10 gallons of garbage in that can last week, so I’d better buy the 13 gallon bags?

Or is it that I have 9 gallons of garbage here, so I’d better borrow 4 from the neighbors to fill the bag?

A PS4 WTF

We got a PS4 for Christmas. When we set it up, it would not detect our Wifi.

I live in the rural west. The tradeoff is bigger house for less restaurants.

In a big house, the reach of your Wifi is tested. So, while we’re running dual bands, the 5.0 Ghz band is the one that is best received by the locations of our devices.

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FWIW

I am getting increasingly frustrated by everything produced by Google. Do you get the impression sometimes that all the items fed to you by Google are actually the same thing regurgitated in slightly different form?? As if the only thing Google tries to present to you is crap written by algorithm?

Anyway, the internet was basically no help, until I found some 3 year old articles about how top end PS4’s released that year were going to have dual band receivers, but that you had to enable the band used.

BTW: I also found quite a few posts from people who’d done DIY jobs on their PS4’s to add better antennas.

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So I went back and dug through the custom set up of my PS4. Buried several layers down I found a choice for the band to use. The PS4 was set to check both bands by default. I reset that to use 5.0 exclusively. What had failed repeatedly now worked in seconds. Clearly the dual band default choice is dodgy.

But really. It’s 2019. Who uses 2.4 Ghz. unless your device is parked right next to your router? I mean, c’mon, someone with a pencil and a place to write made an executive decision to make the default appropriate only for someone living in a dorm room??

A Dog Playing Jenga

The vXyoungman and me talk a lot about "dog culture". We suspect there's much more going on than we guess. And then this came along:

Holy crap, this is incredible: A dog playing Jenga. Turn-taking, fine motor control, apparent understanding of the aim of the game. I would not have guessed a dog could do this. pic.twitter.com/cewL7wmaK5

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 29, 2019

Click through for the video.

Recommended Longread (Well, Not Too Long)

I hate getting fed, but Pocket through Firefox will come up with a few things I like on most days. I try not to succumb.

Today I enjoyed a navel-gazing essay from The Cut entitled “I Met My Husband When I Was 22 and Wild: How Did I Make the Decision That Truly Mattered?” Some snippets:

I had absolutely no sense of consequence, although I was plagued by intrusive thoughts and knocked constantly on wooden tables and doors.

… When I realized I was pining for the man I would marry, I invited him to my grandmother’s 75th birthday party — a bold strategy for courtship.

When I mention the wilder years before, they seem incredulous. It’s dangerous, this gap between past perception and present reality. You insist you’ve been around the block, but it’s a block in a town you no longer recognize and the windows are boarded up.

The curious mix of nostalgia and embarrassment I feel for that freewheeling version of myself coexists with the present reality

Now that we have children, now that our relationship sometimes feels less like a romance than it does a small business involving spreadsheets … The tumult of girlhood flowed into the orderly irrigation channels of civilization.

I made so many stupid decisions during that time it literally takes my breath away to think I might not have made … [fill in your blank there]

For my part, I think the only reason time travel is a thing that we daydream about is that it’s exactly what we’re doing every day as we get older.

I have forgotten so much. I suspect others have too. So I wonder how many occasions I shared with others now exist only in my memories … available for a weird and unsatisfying and barely sharable time travel with people who weren’t there.

It’s especially weird now that the vXyoungman is on the cusp of turning 21, and the vXteengirl is halfway to 18. So many of the experiences that made me who I am occurred before those ages.

I had met the vXwife by the time I was our son’s age, but she says she felt like I was out of her league (it was almost 3 more years before we started dating). I think part of that is that I didn’t dress or act like I was 20. Neither does the vXyoungman.

By the time I was our daughter’s age, I’d already made the dean’s list in college. And I’d already had one of those non-relationships that never launched; I still regret that might-have-been (what was I thinking walking away from that??); even though I chose other seemingly better possibilities, went for a spin, and barely recall those people now, even with effort.

How do I explain to my kids that the only time travel we ever experience leads me to regret nothing I did, but many things I didn’t … and honestly don’t really know about?

And the really bizarre thing is that there have to be some things that weren’t forgotten by the others. I wonder how many of the memories of intersections with people I have I are shared by those same people, and that we both wonder what might have been on the paths not taken so many decades ago?

The City of the Decade (2019 Edition)

The teens are almost over. What American city will our memories associate most with this decade?

Yeah … you’ll have to scroll down if you want the quick answer.

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I posted 14 years ago that prior to the internet, I’d seen the idea of cities being synonymous with decades somewhere in print. But the source is long gone to me.

After much navel gazing (here and here), I decided that the city of the oughties was the IE (Riverside/Ontario/San Bernadino). It was the newer, third part of LA/OC/IE, and the one most on our minds in the Great Recession as home prices went up and then went down again.

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So, here’s my list:

• 20’s = Chicago (organized crime)
• 30’s = Los Angeles (movies)
• 40’s = Washington (war)
• 50’s = New York (live TV)
• 60’s = San Francisco (counterculture)
• 70’s = Houston (oil money)
• 80’s = Miami (style, drug money and kingpins)
• 90’s = Seattle (coffee, grunge and Frasier)
• 00’s = IE: Riverside/Ontario/San Bernadino (immigrants legal and not, house flipping, mortgage issues, butterfly wranglers with $900K budgets)

Here are the also-rans from the last decade, with some snark:

• Phoenix (still … meh)
• Las Vegas (I think it peaked around 1999)
• Salt Lake City
• Denver (maybe it’s me, but this one is fading)
• Austin (still rolling, maybe the 20’s)
• Charlotte (just … nah)
• Riverside and the Inland Empire
• Dallas (never say never … it may still happen)
• New Orleans (sorry, Brad Pitt went home)
• New York (de Blasio is not helping)

You’ll notice there’s not snark after Salt Lake City. I lived there for a year in the early 90’s. Since then, I’ve been back perhaps 30 times. If you haven’t been, you need to go. It’s a pretty amazing place, and has become a magnet for LGBTQ+ people … I’d call parts of it the biggest contiguous area of gentrification I’ve ever seen. And they’re pushing for the Olympics again in 2030. And don’t get me started about the Silicon Slopes. The latest is the forthcoming Real Housewives of Salt Lake City … what a sign that a city has arrived.

My sense right now is that SLC crushes Austin if I’m still writing this blog in 10 years.

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But what about this decade? Honestly, this is pretty easy. The teens are the decade of the smartphone and the network externality driven tech giants, and AppGooBook beats out AmaSoft in Seattle.†

So the city of the decade is the South Bay: San Jose, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and of course Cupertino, Mountain View, and Menlo Park.

† Right after posting this, I learned a new acronym for these: FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). Note that Microsoft isn’t even in there.

City Block Size Infographic

I like this one, probably because I know the size of the block I grew up on: 600 x 340 feet.

I wouldn’t have called it a city block though. I grew up in an established (built in the 1920’s) neighborhood, in a town that was had a 175th birthday when was a kid. Just 20 deep, rectangular, partially fenced lots on a block, in a neighborhood with about 35 similar rectangular blocks.

Where my kids were raised is not so regular. The block is huge: perhaps 800 x 600, but it contains two cul-de-sacs in its interior. And most of the lots have some weird trapezoidness to them, for reasons unknown. When the kids did those exercises about distances in elementary school, it was much harder to come up with good examples for them.

FWIW: I was in a long distance relationship with LH in the mid-80s. She lived in Minneapolis and had no car. We walked a lot of those square blocks at 90 seconds each, including crossing the following street. It was pretty easy to plan out timing.

Via bookofjoe.

Be Coachable

Bob Bowman: “The most important thing is, he’s very coachable.”

That’s a lesson most people could stand to learn. I know I could (although I’ve gotten better at this, with effort).

This video came from the vXyoungman, who was a competitive swimmer in high school.†

He brought this up to me in trying to explain what he got out of athletics (he’s a music major who wants to be concert pianist). He’s fairly assertive that a big problem in music is that a lot of players aren’t very coachable, and a lot of music “coaches” aren’t very constructive.

FWIW: He loves VV, the professor he’s worked with for 2 years.

† The video comes from an ABC show I’ve never heard of from 2009-10, Shaq vs.

Flying Saucer Rebuttal from 1952

JF Ptak Science Books, an antiquarian blog, reproduced a two page report from 1952 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society regarding the large number of flying saucer sightings over the previous 6 years.

It’s a short, even-handed, and fascinating read. Here’s an excerpt:

I couldn’t agree more. I’d rather like if the sightings that are still happening to be extraterrestrial.

For my part, what age has done for me is convinced me that the speed of light can’t be exceeded, and we’re unlikely to ever find anything that wasn’t launched from another star system as an inhabited probe. I’m also much more inclined to think that if observations are real, that they are something interdimensional rather than interstellar, perhaps even something from our own neighborhood of space but from a different neighborhood of time. When I was younger I put much more weight on interstellar and much less on interdimensional. Too much Star Trek I suppose.

Some Local Economics

From our mayor’s newsletter:

Due to the increased cost of recycling … City Council has made the decision to discontinue our recycling binnie programs as of January 1, 2020.

I am not against recycling (and do some pretty questionable “save the trees” things myself … don’t ask the vXwife about my compost).

Having said that, “saving” the planet through, say, recycling, has costs. And the approach of many is to assume that the implicit benefits will cover the explicit costs. Not always so.

In our case, the opportunity costs of recycling are huge. We are distant from larger population centers, and our landfills are old strip mines: huge pits or canyons that you can drive into that will take decades to fill.

Go SUU, Sort Of???

My school, Southern Utah University, was just ranked the 6th most conservative public college in the country.

I wouldn’t disagree. We had a sexuality class taught by biologists discontinued a few years ago due to complaints. And our last president and provost had us designated as Utah’s liberal arts university … and had to backtrack because locals didn’t understand the usage of the word liberal in that context.

Having said that, I wonder what other places are like: we had progressive student protesters saying bigoted things about economists last month.