I've been waiting for something like this. I've got most of my emails, text messages and social media posts since 1997. One day I'm going to load it all up on something like this.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I've been a Proton user since 2016 and a paying customer since 2017 and I'm excited about this acquisition. I use AnyType for note taking, but Standard Notes is a solid alternative and I am excited to see an expanded ecosystem. Makes me very happy to keep keep paying for my $18/month Visionary plan.
This is the problem with the huge wealth inequality that billionaires and centi-millionaires represent. Anyone is welcome to have political opinions; some will be good, some will be bad. But these folks can leverage their wealth to project their ideas across the voting population. They can effectively drown out other opinions and perspectives because money buys ad time and mailer after mailer and armies of canvassers and paid staff that others cannot match.
I am glad to see Schon DSGN there. I got myself a brass "Pocket Six" a few years ago and it is amazing. I use it daily. It is small and write like a dream. The owner now makes his own nib, which looks amazing. Highly recommended.
Absolutely. Years ago I made what is essentially a Unix time / Maya Long Count converter and I was very pleased with how similar they were in concept (i.e. counting seconds or days from a particular epoch) with the only major difference being the base 10 vs base 20.
> I was very pleased with how similar they were in concept (i.e. counting seconds or days from a particular epoch)
I don’t think there are many alternatives. Counting backwards would either mean diving into negative numbers or postponing that by starting at an arbitrary high number.
“In the x-th year of ruler Y” plus a knowledge of the succession of rulers is awkward for recording over centuries. I expect that has been used almost everywhere before history (in the meaning of ‘after prehistory’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory) began, but as far as I know, where written records exist, countries that used it such as Japan also had another system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar)
The reason the Julian day number is important is because Joseph Justus Scaliger went to enormous effort to create a consistent chronology of ancient and mediaeval history from records that mostly used regnal years. Sometimes they might use other calendars, or refer to the 19 year metonic cycle (determining the date of easter) or the day of the week (a 28 year cycle) or the year in the indiction cycle (a 15 year tax period in the eastern roman / byzantine empire). His chronology covered several non-european cultures as well as graeco-roman history. It is neat that astronomers are using a modernized version of his dating system, so ancient records can be more easily matched to modern observations.
I have lived in SF for 11 years. I have worked for nonprofits and ran small businesses, on top of being a renter, so I'm not raking in the big bucks. Before moving here, I lived in Switzerland, Mexico, Canada and the South. I have had less "quality of life" issues here than elsewhere. Sure, some neighborhoods are plagued by homelessness and drug users, but honestly so are some places in Switzerland. Transit is great (could be better), education is too and there's a great sense of community pretty much anywhere. I really don't understand why folks are so upset.
Neighborhood greenways and bike boulevards are becoming more and more common in the US and within professional bike advocacy circles.
The reason why these treatments aren't front and center is because people are being hurt and killed on high-speed arterials, where the best choice is protected bike lanes. Different tools for different problems.
These lessons are a constant part of dialogue here in the US, particularly in cities like SF and NY. I would even call them universal.
The challenge is convincing folks that they are applicable to their street. Most people here are so attached to the car as the only viable form of transportation that they do not see bikes or transit as complete transportation alternatives, despite the best formed arguments.
It can be maddening to see both how little vision and how much time change-resistant people have to protest.
Polk Street in SF could have been the coolest public space in the region if they'd simply had the balls to say "Cars dominate every other street within a mile of here. We're going to make Polk into an open-air promenade that you're welcome to walk or casually bike through." They could have even razed a building within a couple blocks of there and put it ample parking if that's what it took to make progress. Our commercial districts should be destinations, not thoroughfares, and Polk was so close to becoming that before they caved to a propaganda war by some frightened old-timers.
On a completely separate note, if you're interested in cycling policy and working with stubborn merchants like those on Polk, chat with Gary Fisher. He's a smart guy who's spent a lot of time thinking about how to work collaboratively with people who are nervous about changing street priorities. He also is pretty easy to bump into if you hang out with cyclists in SF or Marin.
It is maddening, but I also understand where some Polk merchants are coming from. They're being asked to stake their livelihood on a relatively radical proposal, at least by American standards.
I would like to see the City create some sort of financial incentive (like a tax credit) to bring them on board when it comes to safety improvements. In the long run, it would pay for itself.
I've worked with Gary in the past but thanks for the bringing him up, I'm going to reach to him and have a beer!
That's why this is working in Amsterdam. There is no space to park your car. Parking will cost you up to 8€ an hour. Most streets are narrow so they will get jammed.
All in all going by bike is much faster. That's why this is working in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities.
All the same constraints apply to San Francisco! What little parking exists is expensive and traffic is so bad that getting around by bike is nine times out of ten faster than driving or even transit. That's why SF making (slow) progress.
The real challenge is outside of the dense urban areas, where most people biking are the poor or the undocumented. It's going to require a cultural shift.
The major difference being that Amsterdam is flat as a board, while SF is hella hilly. That does make cycling everywhere a little less of an equal-opportunity means of transport.
That's certainly a factor. Commercial corridors became commercial corridors in SF because they were more accessible for horse and carriage back in the 1850-90s since they were flat, the same reason why they are the ideal bike routes around the hills today.
We can't do anything about these geographic bottlenecks though and the fact is that people are biking more and more, despite the hills. Better transit is probably the key, but I have a tough time seeing cars as a long-term solution.
It's a chicken and egg problem. They aren't viewed as complete alternatives, because they aren't in many locations.
For example, you're going to have a hell of a time getting me to depend on my local bus network, which takes an hour to get me to work- a whole 6 miles away- and I still have to walk one mile. That's not complete.
I'm lucky to live in a bike friendly city with more public transit ambition than many other places, but people can't about-face tomorrow and depend on the public transit or bicycle infrastructure that isn't there, which I think you'll find informs policy.
Climate has a lot to do with it. Very few people would like to bike to work during a Houston summer. It's like riding through Equatorial Guinea during the rainy season.
Very interesting visualization. It complements the recent release of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an excellent introduction to a consistently ignored aspect of US History.
Consistently ignored? Not at all. We are constantly reminded of this topic these days. It's very popular.
For instance, all you hear about on Columbus Day is about how (supposedly) horrible Colombus was, and how people are insulted that we still celebrate him.
Can you elaborate? Perhaps things have changed since I lived in the US (two years ago) but most people I knew were more or less completely ignorant of pre-colonial American history, and had only a passing familiarity with Columbus' misdeeds.
I hope indeed it has changed.
Relatively little is known about pre-colonial history in North America, due to the absence of writing from those times. This is pretty much true of all peoples that did not have writing.
The Mayan rulers carefully documented their vicious wars of conquest (among other things). Some believe the Incas, with their "quipu" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu) recording devices, were on their way to a writing system. But that's really it re: pre-Columbian writing.
There is a fair bit known about the Mayans because of their writing (and a lot of that survived because it was carved into stone). But the N. American peoples did not have writing, and their lifestyle did not leave behind much for archeologists.
Quite a lot of the history has been written from the stories carried down, and I do believe the central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored.
(Edit: quite a lot of the old stories are written down, downvoters- I cannot help if you don't value the current efforts. I won't be providing links as there is Google and I have to deal with a damn blizzard)
I understand that it's simpler to say just "Europeans" instead of "European colonial powers", but before you know it you may cast an unjust collective accuse over an entire continent full of people, many of which had nothing to do with the sins of America's colonization.
Columbus was awful and we should be ashamed for celebrating him. We also learn way too much about native Americans, in some weird cultural guilt trip for past misdeeds. That isn't new--much of my childhood was wasted on learning native American history in the early 1990's.
Agreed. Maybe it's a regional thing, but I remember tons of time spent covering Native Americans in grades K-12. More than any other topic in history, probably. Meanwhile we barely covered European history outside the Age of Exploration, and the rest of the world received even less consideration.
From your "early 1990s" mention I'm thinking we're around the same age, though, so maybe it was different before, or it's changed since. Or, again, maybe it's regional. Mid Westerner, but didn't grow up anywhere near a reservation, for the record.
Wasted? Seriously? If you live in the Americas it's a part of the history of your home. If you think all history is a waste, then sure, but to focus on just the history of the people who lived on a landmass for most of its populated history is a bit inconsistent.
No, it is a waste as a schoolchild to spend years and years studying Native Americans at the expense of everything else, when literally everything we know about them can be learned fairly quickly. There simply isn't that much information there.
Having also been a schoolchild in the 90s, I assume the same material was simply being repeated over and over and over. The American school system is busted like that.
I had the exact opposite experience. Learning about native peoples and their history was extremely fascinating for me and I wouldn't like to have missed out on that knowledge. Learning more about other people is never a waste.
History should be more than being "reminded". Few American could name the three largest Native nations today, much less 100 years ago, or what their systems of government, leaders, or social structures were.
I learned a lot in school about the Puritans, and Ancient Europe and even Egypt and Asian history, but little to nothing about the people who lived in California less than 200 years ago.
