That actually happens? I can’t say I’ve ever gotten hateful misinformation in the mail (and no, I don’t want to find out). My snail mail is mostly spam, with the occasional bill that doesn’t want to be electronic. More than half the time, it all goes directly in the recycle bin.

I always wonder about that:

• I knew a guy with a truck to commute alone into Boston for a desk job. Does home improvement projects but most of the time it’s an excessive vehicle
• Family up the street - a couple of the grown kids live at home and all have trucks. On the one hand it’s a family of Trades, but on the other hand the trucks are spotless, customized, and I never see tools.

I did always wonder about the ladder thing. I see ladders on vans all the time, but it also seems inconvenient. Even as a taller guy, it looks like a reach. How do y’all do it, especially if you are on site alone? Are there racks with some sort of lifting mechanism?

Edit: nvm, someone already posted a picture of such a rack

Ah yes, the cloud dependency required to edit a local file, or the added delay of customizing every time I use a different computer

I suppose there’s always a way, always a compromise that could have been made.

However our situation was more extreme than most. As a software engineer, I earned enough to support my family reasonably well, even on one income. Our family could afford that my ex be a stay-at-home Mom, which many families could not. One of the benefits was also to allow my ex the opportunity to take the job most fulfilling to her (as the kids went to school), despite it paying well below the average income, well below what she could have earned. Trying to support a family on that would be very poor indeed

• The arrogance of seeing only established manufacturers.
• The self-centeredness of assuming US and European are the only markets that matter, and product mix in US is more profitable.
• The instant gratification of not thinking beyond quarterly financials.
• The lack of knowledge of his own business and how to fit engineering timelines into marketing timelines

I’m not saying that lack of women’s opportunity was better: I’m saying it was easier to choose children in a family when one parent could afford it, when one parent could be dedicated to it.

I’m also not saying women’s lack of choice and opportunity was a good thing or that we should wish for it, but you can see how it facilitated a higher birth rate. We never want to go back, but how do we make it easier for people to choose more children, in that context? How can that conflict ever be fixed?

For myself, I loved taking care of kids and believe I would have made a great stay at home Dad. However among other things, my ex could not financially support our family alone and it would have seriously derailed my career, my future ability to support our family. Now that women have the same opportunity, the same choice, the same freedom, they’re also stuck with the same consequences. How can we expect more parents to choose children when you face less ability to support them, for both men and women.

Regardless of societal changes being for the better, we have lasting changes that will keep the birth rate too low

Granted the icons are getting better over time, but all too often I’m still looking for the name to figure out what that mysterious icon is. Now I need to adjust the screen size so more names appear so I can figure out what to click. Wouldn’t it be nice if the names were all visible at a click, organized hierarchically?

Sure auto card is a great example where you might want to maximize a window to make it more useable. Although wouldn’t it be nice if there were small widgets somewhere out of the way for functions like texting or email? I have no idea what the autocad ui is like, but you’d bet I’d be frustrated if some stupid ribbon was taking up valuable screen space, especially the all important vertical space

No wait, let me go with your example ….

You believe a laptop window is useful because you can run a browser with 11 headlines visible

My first work “computer” was a vt100 terminal: black and white, 80 characters wide (on the newer models), by 24 rows. I could and did have a reader that could display as many as 20 headlines on a single screen, and I could scroll and drill down much faster. Sure the UI was shit, but it had the functionality to do the task.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate the usability and power of a modern graphical UI and would never go back. However the point is designers focus too much on eye candy and “doing it because they can” over actual functionality. Can you understand my frustration that a modern 1900x1200 screen with millions of colors is really no more functional than a 40 year old black and white character based terminal. I get that designers want to show off their UI, but I want the UI to get out of my way and let me do more stuff. I want there to be more focus on compactness and efficiency. I want at least some attention paid to using resources wisely

Wow, you can fit one whole browser window on it … with headlines.

Even back in the CRT days, I could have a couple windows, such as email, text, and IDE

• my email program now has huge wasted ui space so might take up the whole laptop screen, leaving me thing. Email is not work, but something on the side for communication that shouldn’t interfere with work
• my text chat is no longer a tiny rectangle in the corner but has huge wasted ui space and wants to take up an entire laptop screen. Even that is sometimes not enough. Text is not work, text is somethign on the side that shouldn’t interfere with work
• my IDE has huge waste UI space and no longer fits any useable workspace on a laptop screen

Laptops are great for portability: I used to carry them to work from any loaation. It was great while it lasted. Now I carry it from docking station to docking station, and I’m back to the bad old days of dpneeding an office set up, so I can have usable monitors

I remember when much lower resolution was useful, now that’s a small size. Maybe a core problem is the number of people who maximize a window (see, look how much room there is), rather than trying to have multiple Windows to work together

Then how will I find new features? How will I use other computers? I just want the functionality organized in some predictable way and leave me some place to work in. I want my work to be the focus, not some designer on peyote’s idea of a good time. And I want to be able to do it on any computer I happen to use

The Black Plague, WW1, WW2

That’s my point

• Black Plague resulted in hundreds of years or pd societal disruption, end of political and economic structure and changing national borders -WWI caused the rise of Nazism and Communism, creating 100 years of societal disruption, end of political and economic structure and changing national borders
• WWII caused huge societal disruption, destruction of former economic and political power, changing national borders. As an American, I benefit from the destruction in previous economic powerhouses that helped the dominance of us capitalism for half a century, but people in those countries may not appreciate it, nor am I blind enough to see it as all good.

Your examples are also one time events, vs lasting societal changes

• regardless of the horrors of war, it’s eventually over
• do you think our economic system will go back to one income being enough
• do you think we should stop educating women, stop giving the opportunities?
• do you think women’s role is in the kitchen and bedroom and do you really think we’re goi g back to that?
• do you think people will stop taking the edge off with internet porn?

Your examples are limited in scope, leaving much of the world unaffected

• Black Plague was mostly Europe, everyone else was fine -WWI, mostly Europe
• WWII was much bigger but still many areas unaffected
• so far the plunge in birth rates is ubiquitous. Different places are on different parts of the curve, but it happens everywhere

No e or f?

I doubt they fear surrender.

It’s more like preferring quick and painless suicide over lying in the field maimed and in desperate pain wishing you had died. Maybe you’ll die slowly as you bleed out. May e you’ll be a target of the new thermite drone and be set on fire to die in agony. Maybe you’ll live on in pain and disfigurement with no hope for the future. Maybe you’re not there willingly and do not want to kill or see your friends killed

I am. Lower birth rates are no big deal now and may be a necessity for the near term, but it’s a worrying trend for the future. As we drop well below replacement birth rate, each generation becomes a lot smaller than previous, giving us an aging population that quickly drops as larger generations die off. This could lead to more disruption, political instability, huge costs as we can no longer afford the infrastructure we’ve built out, and less opportunity for scientific, technical, mental or cultural growth.

To compound this, countries with worryingly low birth rates have found tremendous generational inertia. Once it becomes common for fewer people to choose parenthood, you can’t easily change that.

To me, this is a similar problem to climate change. We’re here in the 1970s trying to reduce pollution but no one cares. Or maybe we’re in the 1990s fighting to get global warming recognized but no one sees any environmental changes. Do y’all need collapsing societies before you recognize the long term trend! Heck, even the “tipping point” ideas have analogies.

If we act now, maybe we can implement some tweaks to slow the decrease or even stabilize it in some future generation

people aren’t going to stop having sex.

Let me introduce you to the internet. But seriously, with economic forces against having children, education and human rights giving people more choice than ever, and a new outlet with online life, these are permanent societal changes that are disrupting that cycle. Birth rate has never been this low across the developed world and continues heading lower.

So it acts like a menu bar …. But with extra clicks to make it go away

Yet the menus had a search option and were fully customizable … and didn’t waste so much screen space.

As a user, I’ve never once thought: “I wish I couldn’t fit so many windows on my screen”, nor “I wish non-working space takes up most of my screen forcing me to buy bigger monitors”

Ha, but the presence of vertical monitors means we can do this , amirite? We’re just better using the screen space people have …. Who have spent hundreds of dollars extra on extra hardware to make this shitty ui usable