That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China.
They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote.
They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.
It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.
I ordered cups and did specify the thickness (based on a reference) of the plastic but didn’t specify how thick the boxes they shipped in should be. Guess what happened!
> It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.
That's the thing that makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it work better for everyone involved, including the manufacturer, if they come back with a "here's exactly how we interpreted your spec and what materials we're using, including cases where we picked something you left unconstrained", and a corresponding price for using those materials, with the understanding that if you want different materials you get a different price, before they do any manufacturing whatsoever?
Yes but as OP pointed out, that requires you (or them) to spec it all out. And if you do, that’s how it works, and that’s probably exactly what happened when you buy any well-made product that was designed in America and built in China.
But a whole lot of manufacturing relies on the OEM not just for the production but also some of the engineering. They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.
A friend of mine worked for a major vacuum company that has 3 well-known lines. The very high end line is manufactured in the USA. The mid range line is fully designed here but manufactured there.
The low end line they basically tell a Chinese OEM what it should look like and certain parts of it and let the OEM fill in the blanks. OEM makes vacuums for other brands too, they know what size wires to use where, why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium?
OP is making something fundamentally different than what exists in some ways. It’s a lamp, but obviously it has some considerations other lamps don’t.
Also hardware (as OP pointed out) has long development cycles during which prices can actually fluctuate significantly. You don’t want to lock in cost plus pricing or you’ll end up buying components from their sister company at astronomical prices. You might not have time to source 100 different parts from Chinese OEMs yourself. Etc.
The whole thing is a complex guessing game. I’ve only manufactured approximately the simplest objects imaginable (stuff like gaskets and cups) and found it to be far more complex than I thought it would be. Manageable but something like a lamp I could see being a lot of unexpected work. I did not see, for instance, how much effort I had to put in speccing out the packaging for simple objects but then I found myself repacking things here.
> They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.
And yet, every single time I've seen reports of people having trouble with manufacturing, this was one of the problems. Someone presumably had to figure out all the little parts, so send the result of the figuring out before manufacturing begins!
I'm not trying to oversimplify, here. There are constraints this doesn't account for; for instance, getting a spec written in English might be an added expense. But getting whatever was written doesn't seem unreasonable...
> why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium
But someone had to spec it out, and it seems like it'd help everyone involved to communicate that spec, even if it's just filed in a drawer somewhere.
Well, they will send you whatever you ask them to, and it would help you if you caught an error. That would require you to know what you were looking at. For that you’d probably have to be an electrical engineer.
So you’d have to spend electrical engineering salary on checking over every little wire. That adds to cost and timeline.
Part of what you use the OEM for is so that they have to spec it out, not your expensive engineers, and get something lower cost and faster.
And frankly, a lot of things you just don’t expect that you have to tell them. Like the wire length issue in this particular post, you would expect them to just get that at least approximately correct.
You don’t know what you don’t know and it’s easy to evaluate in hindsight, but what you’re not seeing in this post is all the things they just did correctly with no prompting. There were surely very many, and each of them saved a good amount of time and money.
You're not wrong, but there are 1000 of those rc cars, and maybe 20% have that feature you want, but everyone buys the cheapest because they don't know which has slightly better quality.
Now go with Kyosho or Tamiya and you DO know it will be best in class, but at 10x the cost.
We live in an age where we can make our own inflation. We can choose between 2 products one with realistic expectations at greater cost and one that just looks like the other product but didn’t go the extra mile to ensure the product will function.
I live near Paris, and it's a shame to see this sort of thing on every surface here. It's so easy and effortless to trash the look of a place, and so much effort and pain to get it back to a presentable state. It just seems hopeless trying to stop it.
Sure, you can point to examples of graffiti that don't look all that bad, and I imagine some examples can even be considered to improve the look of a space. But taking this site as a random sample, the "good" ones are a vanishing minority. For every subtle Invader mosaic high on a building, you get dozens of effortless name tags that just wreck the look of a place.
Adding frustration is the fact that there's no way to effectively dissuade people from doing this. You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop. You just want them to stop spraypainting shit. It's really the only example I can think of where I'd support some form of corporal punishment. Catch kids in the act, 20 lashes in the town square to convince them not to do it again, then set them to work with a wire brush until they can demonstrate that it's back to the state they found it. Even still, I can't imagine it would really do much to dissuade.
Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city. It's a very common form of countercultural resistance and therefore an important relief valve. It's a way for anyone to express themselves on their environment. A city only has value because it's occupied by many people, and those people need to express their autonomy and quite literally "leave their mark."
Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia. Just as I scrawled onto a bathroom stall in 2005 "Cameron takes it up the bum," so too did Salvius write of his friend on a wall in the House of the Citharist in the year 79, "Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this."
>It's a very common form of countercultural resistance and therefore an important relief valve. It's a way for anyone to express themselves on their environment.
So, what are these random scribblers resisting, exactly? It's like saying that defecating on the street is a form of self-expression and "leaving their mark". Even if it is, do we really need to tolerate it?
>Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia.
There is nothing lovely about seeing all this garbage littering the walls of public buildings and historical finds do not justify this behaviour.
> So, what are these random scribblers resisting, exactly?
The idea that the city is owned by the uppermost caste of that society.
> There is nothing lovely about seeing all this garbage littering the walls of public buildings and historical finds do not justify this behaviour.
Massive cathedrals to the rich would be erected and made holy, and individuals upon whose back society is build would demonstrate that though entrance is barred to them, they still can make the thing their own.
Nowadays there's plenty of such things in a city that closes its doors to many people that live in said city. San Francisco is a great example of this, where rising costs are pushing anyone not working in tech. Graffiti is an easy way to spit in the face of the rich that are trying to take a city away from you. Clearly, it has an outsized impact on their sensibilities.
I suspect most graffiti doesn't actually have this twisted motivation. It's just selfishness by thoughtless people wanting to advertise themselves, like dogs marking their territory.
This intellectual rationalisation is more of a projection by resentful people with a poisonous worldview.
The people being hurt by this aren't the millionaire or billionaire tech caste.
I'm reminded of when rioters were trashing stores in response to George Floyd's death. The usual justification was "oh business insurance will cover it, they need an outlet for their emotions" Well, the only grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood was out of commission for weeks due to damage. A black owned liquor store was burned down, and he didn't have insurance. Lots of similar stories on Lake Street. The people who deserved that harm the very least got it the most.
I really don't understand the connection between street art and the George Floyd protests. I understand that you generally don't like the idea of people operating outside of the State-mandated heteronormative way, in which case I say, the best way to prevent a riot is not have cops murder people.
We whitewash crime every day here, for example theft of labor value. It's not a crime in the USA but it is a crime insomuch as it's unethical.
You said "value" of labor, not salary. Salary indicates at best, market rate, but often not even that. Value is something else entirely, and that something seems to be completely disconnected from capitalist measures of market price. See: investment banker salaries vs teachers. See also: the price of a monkey JPEG. Even capitalist value is disconnected from market price, see the current stock market.
> Nobody has ever found a better system.
Anarchists in Spain did in 1936 when they syndicalized the majority of the economy. BTW Walter I'm not sure you remember but I'm fairly certain you've replied these exact words to me before.
Value is what you're willing to pay for something, and what you're willing to accept as payment.
> Even capitalist value is disconnected from market price, see the current stock market.
The value of a stock is the market price. There is no other value.
The value of a teacher is what you're willing to pay for him, and what he is willing to accept. The value of government paid teachers is not knowable, since the money to pay them is forcibly extracted.
> I'm fairly certain you've replied these exact words to me before.
Your confidence doesn't mean you're right. Your definition of value doesn't include a mechanism to determine the difference between contextual value, an awkwardness obvious in your comment, after all, the stock market wouldn't exist unless the value for a seller was different than the value for a buyer, or why else would the buyer buy? There's more than just price involved in the consideration.
Also, the word "value" is used outside of monetary contexts. If you said "I value you" to a loved one, I doubt even an avout capitalist libertarian such as yourself would be so heartless as to put a dollar price on that "value." So no, value is not just "what you're willing to pay." That's a Chicago school of economics lie that has been allowed to determine the mechanics of neoliberal society.
In any case this isn't really a conversation if you just keep saying the same thing over and over again, "value is cost," using basically undifferentiated examples.
You really think that the majority of taggers are thinking this deep? It’s mostly teenagers in high school that are mimicking others thinking “I’m so cool”. It fights nothing regardless. We can assign it value out of our asses all day and take some documentary as the truth, but if you think a kid writing a random scribble on the bart window or a bar bathroom, or a small business’s door deserves to take any of that back from the “caste” what are we talking about?
The city is everyone’s, the tagger claiming a wall is as selective as what you claim the city is doing. Why do they think some random surface is more theirs than everyone else’s? I find tagging more selfish than what the city is doing.
> You really think that the majority of taggers are thinking this deep?
Nope, not something I thought up at all, this is what I discovered after talking to a lot of taggers and street artists as a result of my photography obsession leading me into the skater scene. I used to think tagging was just gangs marking territory (in reality only a small portion of it is).
What I have noticed is that a certain class of people have formed an immutable idea of taggers, skaters, and street artists, and that idea includes that for whatever reason all these sorts of folks are stupid. I've found that to be not the case at all.
I was a skater myself and many of the people I used to hang with would be into tagging. None of us were rich, if anything the taggers around me had more privileges than the not taggers. I couldn’t afford the expensive markers or spray cans for example. I don’t know what you mean by certain class of people.
You don't see graffiti in rich neighborhoods either because you're describing the suburbs where nobody really lives (as a measurement of people per square kilometer) or because rich neighborhoods get immediate attention by cleaners (or the rich hire private cleaners).
There's plenty of graffiti in Manhattan, have you looked up how much it costs to rent there lately?
This is an interesting point, but I push back a bit. First, "Manhattan" is much larger than most people realise. There is almost no graffiti in the rich neighborhoods (Upper West/East, etc.), but there is plenty of graffitti in the more iffy neighborhoods (East Villiage, ABCs, SOHO, etc.). It pretty much scales with wealth -- richer has less graffiti. Second, specific to this post about San Francisco, there is almost no graffiti in the suburban areas out west (Sunset, Richmond) and wealthy neighborhoods like Russian Hill or The Marina, but loads of graffiti in The Mission, Potrero Hill, and SoMa.
Resisting the ideology that only people with money can alter the city environment.
When you see an impressive sculpture or skyscraper you know a lot of resources were spent, you know the rich people here are rich. When you see an area with lots of graffiti, there may be many good or bad things about it, but you know the citizens are free.
I would hope graffitiers have respect to only draw on the mundane parts of the city, not on cool sculptures. And in my experience, that is true. Also they should not obscure windows or information signs.
I think that's very exciting for you, because imo it's very rarely we encounter truly challenging problems like this.
I understand that you prefer to make up your mind about street artists, but I can assure you as someone that used to hold the same opinion, that opinion is held from a place of unfamiliarity with the culture and the people in it. It was very enlightening for me to step out of my SF tech circle into the street art scene and talk to very, very different people. You may be different but I personally find it very important to challenge my thinking by talking to very different kinds of people.
Random online interactions rarely change anyone's opinions, and you don't have to accept my worldview, and neither I need to accept yours. I am just somewhat saddened that there are people who would defend defacing the city like that, but at the same time, I understand that we are byproducts of our environment. I think I should consider myself lucky that I happen to live in a place which I appreciate. It's not that I am incapable of admiring art or loathe graffiti as a style, but, at least based on my experience, most of it are just cases of vandalism. My city actually have places dedicated to graffiti artists, so that they can create whatever they want freely, but I guess that removes at least some of the fun.
Our environment controls us, and we are also allowed to control our environment.
Graffiti is like protesting. The government likes to contain it and deny it and suppress it. Your city probably has a free speech zone where protesting is allowed, which is far out of the way so those protests won't have an audience, but that is not where protests occur when they occur.
>Your city probably has a free speech zone where protesting is allowed, which is far out of the way so those protests won't have an audience, but that is not where protests occur when they occur.
What a weird thing to say. I don't know whether you live in some totalitarian regime or assume that you do, but I don't. However, I can see it as means of protesting, an we can find examples of it in history and current day, but most graffiti out there is not that at all.
To be honest, most protesting is silly as well, go hang out in front of government buildings or go to a city council meeting to see for yourself, it's just as often legitimate grievances as it is nutballs ranting about aliens.
I'm not American, but I doubt being pro-graffiti is a universal American value. I suspect many Americans aren't that into it, given it makes the place look bad. Many Americans might think instead that you should only deface things you own.
because you find it ugly? Because the city/HOA is asking? Because it's a political message you don't agree with (or don't want your house to get burned for it)?
As a renter, graffiti is great for me, it keeps property values down which keeps rent lower. And given that I don't aesthetically give a shit about it, it's win/neutral for me.
>Are you American? Freedom means the ability to do what you want. It doesn't mean owning guns.
No, I am not, and I haven't mentioned guns or even hinted at the topic. Do whatever you want, but trying to purposefully destroy and smear the environment around you and claim it's an expression of freedom is ridiculous. It's just malicious, disgusting behavior that helps no one, serves no cause and has nothing to do with freedom.
You would be doing so alongside tens of other artists, and then after a month or so I would whitewash the wall, and everyone would start up all over again. Such is street art. Kinda beautiful, how much effort people put into art they know will be gone or changed possibly within a couple days.
People not only tolerate, but I'd argue most people prefer it. I think, unlike Singapore or Tokyo, Americans, in cities, largely prefer a little lived in grime.
The Mission Bay is a relatively new neighborhood in San Francisco - mostly free of graffiti and is pretty much sterile, and most people would prefer to live in the Mission rather than Mission Bay. OpenAI likely pays a huge premium to HQ in the mission rather than settling in the more corporate offices of Mission Bay or even the Financial District.
I also noticed the same in Berlin - Kreuzberg, Neukolln, and other neighborhoods in East Berlin attract the most people, despite being drenched in graffiti.
If ever move to a city in America and tell people you live in the generally clean, spick and span, neighborhood in that city, half the people will look at you like you have 3 heads or simply assume you have no personality. Graffiti has largely become an accepted, or even valued, feature of a neighborhood. I believe internally it separates the "cool" city inhabitants from the "losers" out in the suburbs.
Edit: I just looked through all the images in the OP and one of them is a banksy. It's been there for over a decade. Graffiti isn't just tolerated, its practically protected.
> Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city.
I think this is the heart of it, and where cities and suburban towns differ.
It's admittedly very hard to articulate in words. The walls of buildings in a city are part of the greater, broader, "face of the city." They are in a sense both part of a general "public space" yet also still privately owned. The walls of single family homes in suburban neighborhoods don't really compare. There's much more of a shared sense of "ours" in a city than there is out in the country, where everything's fenced off in little discrete boxes of land, each with someone's name on it. This greater sense of shared agency over the aesthetic of the broader "city" makes street art more justifiable there than it is in single family home places.
"It really undermines the sense of community when vandals deface public spaces and community centers and apartment blocks."
I much prefer graffiti in my field of vision than corporate billboards. In SF I don't even notice the graffiti, maybe because most of it is hard to read and understand? But I do notice the huge huge billboards over every thoroughfare with the stupid corny messages.
The people in these communities feel the opposite of you, especially since a lot of street art is murals capturing some local culture e.g. see Clarion Alley in San Francisco, a lot of very explicit messages of community.
Then why is Clarion Alley covered in graffiti that hundreds of people a day come to look at? Why is said graffiti often applied by residents?
City ordinance is not an accurate reflection of the desires of all subsections of a city. It's a reflection of the desires of the ruling caste, whose needs sometimes, but frequently don't, align with those of "lower" castes.
A bench is a great place for a nap, unless the mayor happens to see you sleeping on one, gets scared, and calls the cops about it.
Until it is done to your small business or home, then it is no longer an "important relief valve". The solution to reducing graffiti is multi-part. Here are a few ideas: (1) Pass a state law to restrict the sale of spray paint -- you need a special license to buy it. (2) Pass a local law to reward citizens who provide evidence of taggers (video, photos, etc.). If the city can convict, you are rewarded. Make the reward large enough (1000+ USD?) to be strongly encouraging. (3) Create public spaces where people are allowed to spay paint. This is a little bit like skate parks.
I think I used to believe something like this. But I spent two decades living in this context and changed my mind.
There can be beautiful and effective expressions of culture and resistance that don’t tear down the commons people are trying to build together. And it’s hard to ask people to take care of the commons when other people aren’t. Instead we cede management of shared space to private enterprise (malls and gyms and retail as entertainment because your parks are torn up).
If you're a cinema person, I strongly recommend Agnes Varda's documentary on LA street art at the end of the 1970s, Mur Murs. (That's a pun: murals as an expression of the murmurs of the community.) It takes graffiti as an expression of ownership as the central thesis and I found it really lovely. Thanks for this comment.
Sometimes tagging is that, sure, or just some person indicating that they exist there. For some taggers, it's an addiction. I knew one that would tag at people's houses when invited to parties. I was outside smoking a cigarette with him after the owner had threw him out on his ass, asking why he did shit like that, and he said "I just feel like if I can tag someone's house, it's like I've won."
I can kinda empathize since I'll have an addiction to getting the perfect photograph during a protest or whatever and will go to extreme lengths and burn through SD cards to get it.
In my experience the majority of graffiti is artists just putting up art. Privileged folk pass down the propaganda that graffiti is dirty and gangster and so any street art is viewed as dirty, but in the end it's just a matter of taste.
> the majority of graffiti is artists just putting up art.
Art? Where I live the overwhelming majority of graffiti is just a few letters forming meaningless words... Like even if it was art, no one could appreciate it because no one could understand it.
Eh, that kinda sucks. If you learn to read it, it can be a bit cool to see who's where. But I would say the majority of graffiti in my city is at minimum a little doodle, and often full blown murals. If that's not the case where you live that is indeed a bit ofa bummer.
Art? There are some exceptions, indeed, where graffiti can be called art, but most of it is tasteless disgusting mess. It's borderline demonic in some cases. This especially applies to the list of pictures in the post. My theory is why ugliness is often considered beautiful is because ugliness invokes stronger and darker emotions.
Demons aren't real so I don't understand what this means.
> tasteless disgusting mess
Do you disagree that taste is subjective, then? It seems what's happening here is that you're very, very confident that you are an authority on what's beautiful, despite several people telling you they find beauty in what you abhor.
The type of art you like or dislike is a reflection of your mental state. In this sense, taste is subjective. However some of those mental states are good and some are evil, which is objective. If I suddenly find myself liking aggressive chaotic art, I'll be worried that something's changed in me in a bad way.
But you're right that I'm very confident in my measure of what's beautiful and what's not, and a few people aren't going to sway me. Even if every last human on the earth fell for this demonic art, I wouldn't budge.
Your unshaking confidence in your subjective experience as being representative of something factual about the universe made me peek at your history to see just how far it went. I found this comment:
> It's the Christian version of the Dao.
So far as I can tell, this isn't a thing that actually exists, but you refer to it as "the," meaning that to you, it's an objectively existing thing that we should all recognize.
Alongside that:
> The type of art you like or dislike is a reflection of your mental state
No, this is not objectively true in the way you seem to be implying.
> some of those mental states are good and some are evil, which is objective
No, practically by definition, "good" and "evil" are subjective.
> Even if every last human on the earth fell for this demonic art, I wouldn't budge.
Yes, this is clear.
Out of good faith and frank honesty I tell you this: There is no purpose in conversing with you, as apparently you're only capable of lecturing people of the Verified-by-Jehovah Revealed Truth of your personal ideology.
The most well known writers (this is their term, few if any graffiti writers I know refer to themselves as artists) are actually the ones who paint trains, not in metro areas. Yes, writers do paint all over metro areas, but that gets buffed out so quickly that the real holy grail is to get up on trains that go all over the country.
Train graffiti allows your art to roam and writers from other cities see it and recognize it. Your creativity proceeds you when you go to other cities to write and expand where you're known.
I live in a large metro and see very little if any gang graffiti. Also, most of the really good stuff? You never know its there because its under bridges, in aqua ducts and other areas few, if any people know about or venture to.
They should work as plate cleaners and civil park workers 100 hours a month. That will teach those entitled teens to leave their mark while autonomously cleaning those plates and planting flowers.
> Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city.
Is of course what art-students, pol-sci and social-sciences majors construct out of it because it fits their narratives. Never mind that the scratching of some roman soldier in a brothel's restroom has nothing to do at all with the NYC-born graffti culture. This top-to-bottom social astro-turfing would be just laughable grandstanding if it didn't result in real consequences for less affluent kids: crime, drugs, and deadly injuries as well as filing for bankrupcy at an age where Mrs. cultural-capital has acquired her prestigous arts degree.
I was thinking that too, it feels remarkably out of touch. People own the builds, homes, and businesses. If you're graffiting someone's business you're a tourist in the city, not an owner. Even from a philosophical perspective this makes no sense, because it claims the tourists hold ownership over someone else's city because they bought a can of spray paint while living in their parents basement
> This top-to-bottom social astro-turfing would be just laughable grandstanding if it didn't result in real consequences for less affluent kids: crime, drugs, and deadly injuries as well as filing for bankrupcy
We were discussing graffiti.
You seem to know a lot better than less affluent people what's good for them. When you talk to such people, what do they tell you about crime, drugs, deadly injury, and filing for bankruptcy? When you've talked to graffiti artists, what led you to believe they were doing it so as to cause crime, drugs, deadly injury, and bankruptcy?
Tons of people unfortunately see this as ok. My response to them is always "let me tag your car, your house, your laptop" and if you complain you're a hypocrite
I like "Street Art" where permission has been given. I don't like tagging and property destruction. Maybe when I get a little older I'll find some graffiti exhibit at a museum and go tag it.
I really enjoy graffiti murals, and I go out of my way to photograph them in my own city and when I travel. I will see them when I driving or walking around and stop to look for a moment and try to understand the perspective and message of the artist and take a picture if I can.
That said, I don't much like tagging, tagging is generally not art in my opinion even if you can say artist styles are used within it. Tagging is all about ego and selfishness, it's there purely for the sake of saying "I was here", as if you are the most important person in the city that you should claim to put your name on that wall.
I've met quite a few graffiti artists all over the world in my travels, and the people who tag and the people who paint murals are by and large /not/ the same people. The folks who paint murals are trying to say something, the folks who tag have nothing more to say than to try to create a monument of some kind to themselves. I don't respect taggers, I do respect muralists.
I consider corporal punishment inherently barbaric. An appropriate fine or short stay in jail ought not be life-ruining.
Also, I think there are other effective approaches in some circumstances. People (including "the kids"), locally (Toronto) and other places I've heard of, have been paid (not a super common thing, but it happens) to do actual artwork. There's a mural I consider quite well done, not too far from my place, that isn't getting defaced even though it's in a place where I would otherwise ordinarily expect strong temptation to "tagging" and other graffiti.
I've heard real estate people call this legalized extortion, since you have to select a graffiti artist with enough reputation that others don't mess with the piece.
I’ve heard such reputations involve not only the caliber of the art, but also the retributive consequences the artist and friends are thought to impose on people who deface their work…
I think there is a lot of nuance here. Just as councils and developers can construct ugly buildings artists can also add ugly work to walls.
I agree there is a spectrum. On one hand you've Banksy or Basquiat adding to a flat grey wall and creating art that has a political voice or some artistic merit and the other you've some twat scribbling hate symbols on a historic monument. I don't have on ideas on how we can ensure one and not the other though.
It sounds like you're saying the only thing ugly about tagging is when it contains objectionable political content. That's not really responding to the complaint here, which is that the vast majority of it is low effort, low quality tagging that makes things aesthetically uglier. It's easy to go out with a collector's eye, cherry-pick the good stuff, and put together a slideshow that makes it look like a public amenity, but that ignores the overall effect of wall after building after block of proof of Sturgeon's Law.
Is it ignorable? Does all the terrible stuff just disappear into the background, or should we care about how it affects the experiences of people who have to live with it and walk past it every day? I think that's the question people are arguing.
> You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop.
Oh yes, you want to (with an asterisk). As a former Graffiti writer myself I can speak from experience that the judge will be the first person in those kids life taking their actions seriously, giving them any sort of guidance.
Better spend a couple of hours per month doing social work than letting them slip further away until no softer juvenile criminal code is there to protect them.
One of the most startling differences between Chinese and European cities is the lack of grafitti in China. I wonder if it's explained by laws, norms, enforcement?
To include the obvious in this discussion, it's your opinion that street art / graffiti makes things ugly; others feel differently. I think it brings places alive, brings human expression into the otherwise highly controlled environment. There's a spirit to it, and I love to see kids who have no voice take the step of speaking up. I love to see it, generally. To me it's a sign of freedom and very democratic.
As for it's quality as art, I don't buy that's a purely subjective, arbitrary opinion (meaning, I think it's reasonable to use some judgment). But people still differ greatly: look at their responses to abstract expressionism, for example; some people think it's trash, others pay tens of millions.
There is plenty of ugly in cities: There is a lot of ugly architecture; buildings are much more visually prominent and for aesthetics I would remove the ugly ones much sooner than removing the street art. There is ugly advertising and marketing; there are ugly industrial sites on beautiful waterfronts and in neighborhoods.
Should those be subject to the same judgement as some kids expressing themselves? The people who make the buildings, ads, sites have far more power and resources, including enough to make those beautiful. They seem much more responsible for the results than the kids, who may have nothing else.
I think mostly here in switzerland, it’s tolerated in certain areas, and even directly sponsored, in Lausanne, nearly every pedestrian underpass is completely covered in pretty good work, every bit of street furniture has unique designs that seem to be left alone by taggers, areas that might otherwise be run down are covered in colourful murals that are regularly refreshed, i think this is the right approach.
My theory is that graffiti is tied to the feeling of lack of agency in one's life. Everyone wants to "make their mark on the world". Some of us get to do that with an interesting career, building a family, getting involved in the community. If you feel excluded from all that, like those things are beyond your reach, you might resort to things like graffiti. IMO it's something that says "I exist, and I can change things around me" for those who don't have a better way to do that.
Based on that we "fix" the problem by making sure that everyone has a chance to make a fulfilling life for themselves. Better & freer education; Healthcare; cost of living & wage support. Etc.
Are there places people can legally grafitti there? In a number of small towns there are unofficial grafitti rocks or walls in public view that redirects a lot of peoples mischief and desire to display public art. Nobody is in any actual trouble if they are caught painting it although you will lose your paint.
It might not be a total solution, but it could have a significant impact on grafitti other places.
There's Clarion Alley in the heart of the Mission, which I think is open to graffiti, as everything is plastered with it, most of it looking really nice. You can see it on Street View.
I understand what you're saying but harsh punishment doesn't really work, they just increase the stakes of the crime and lead to more desperate behavior to avoid getting caught rather than less occurrence of the crime itself. Pretty much the only effective form of crime deterrent is economic development, i.e. give people something else to do.
an invader mosiac is not graffiti, it's street art, which is more or less the mortal enemy of graff. I'm not even trolling when I say people with attitudes like yours are what legit motivate so many graff writers out there.
Graffiti on things like trees (e.g. in urban parks) is awful and trees are the opposite of artificial and antiseptic. The main problem with graffiti is that most of it is made without thought or consideration, and that never ends well.
Most graffiti is an ugly demoralising reminder of the existence of thoughtless people who have no consideration for others and are happy to degrade the shared public space for a few seconds of selfish enjoyment. For some reason it's got noticeably worse where I live, feels like over the last couple of years.
most modern buildings are an ugly demoralising reminder of the existence of thoughtless people who have no consideration for others and are happy to degrade the shared public space for a few seconds of selfish enjoyment (or in this case, millions of dollars at the public's expense).
I like that part of it too - but feel that if I owned a building and had people spraying paint all over its exterior whenever they felt like it...maybe not so much.
You don't get to choose what others value. I value my walls being clean. You value your windows and car. If it's not ok for your car and windows to be tagged then it's not okay for others to tag my walls.
Ah, mate. I sure wish you'd figured this out and told me about it 10 years ago. I fought with this exact same issue for years.
I live in an old stone farmhouse with my office in a stone garage across a nice poured concrete driveway. There's wires from A to B under all that, but nobody except an unknown electrician from the 80s could tell you even where they come out at either end.
Powerline kinda worked, with crap download speed and just abysmal upload (0.1mbps max), and I limped along with it for years.
When we upgraded to Fibre, that left the old phone line spare, and as luck would have it went straight from the office to the router cabinet in the house. But 80s electrician guy didn't use Cat5, so my genius attempt to use it as ethernet cable ended up slower than the powerline.
My eventual solution was a crazy powerful point-to-point wifi beam blasting straight through the 3 foot thick stone wall to a receiver in the garage below the office. It sets birds on fire from time to time if they fly through it while Helldivers is downloading an update, but it gets the job done.
Still, I might look in to getting one of these things as an upgrade.
Another solution: run ethernet cables outdoors on the ground.
You can do ethernet cables outdoors from your router in your house to your router in your office. Either thin cables that go under doors, or outdoor rated ones, both can work fine.
This same approach can work inside a house as an alternative to mesh networking or running cables through walls. The cables don't have to be invisible (underground or in walls) when you have tough constraints, unless you want them to be.
There is equipment that will dig a small tunnel like thing under concrete, avoiding needing to destroy your driveway (assuming there is space on either side) . Won't be cheap, but it's possible.
> The direct line across would get run over by cars. Indirect routes would still have to cross pavement and look ugly.
Search for "cable protector ramps"
> And then there are still those six feet of stone that needs drilling through to get the cable outside and back in.
Thin cables designed to run under doors or windowsills are an option. Search for "flat ethernet cable"
It seems like you prefer your setup for good reasons, and these solutions above are both ugly, but I still wanted to note to others reading this that workarounds exist.
It's just that almost anything is better than wifi in concrete/stone houses. I can see point-to-point outside with an unobstructed view being reliable enough. But point-to-point through 3ft of concrete is [HN is a neglected Xennial hobby and doesn't support emojis]!
Certainly worth reconsidering wired when that P2P hardware goes EOL.
To what end? The runs aren't going to be long enough for fiber to provide a benefit, and the transceivers are more expensive for consumer use like this.
I've worked with DB people and running lines under driveways for telco and cableco is BIG business and they will not find your request to bury fiber or cat5 to be even remotely unusual.
The bad news about directional boring is they usually want "like a kilobuck" just to show up. Its a lot of heavy equipment and a lot of dudes to operate it all.
The good news is if they're already down the road they'll come by and bore for like $20/foot because its a small job (usually they only charge $10/foot for long runs)
Permitting depends a lot on where you live, some places treat it as a cash cow and they will brutally milk you, others don't require a permit at all. The equipment takes up a fair amount of space on each side, probably more than you'd expect. Scheduling is like dealing with an arborist. "OMG I need this partially collapsed tree removed immediately its an emergency I have homeowners insurance please arrive in the next hour" well thats multiple kilobucks "Meh please remove this tree sometime and I don't care when" well thats like $250, probably less if cash.
I've seen people spend thousands of dollars on DB or crazy laser/wireless comm gear to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on a stone mason. Try not to pay someone to DB under a stone wall, its usually cheaper to hire a stone mason twice and he will leave the wall in better condition than before you started. All masonry is temporary unless its maintained. Similar logic might apply to driveways, most concrete cracks so if you're hiring a guy to fix the crack you may want to bury a conduit before he fixes it. Replacing an entire driveway is expensive, replacing a sidewalk sized path is surprisingly cheap. If you want sidewalk poured (like for a walkway in your garden or around a swimming pool) its about $50/foot and a driveway would have to be thicker and better prepped, but the section could be narrower than a sidewalk. The point being don't accept a DB bid over $50/ft because its cheaper to replace the concrete at $50/ft.
There are simpler ways to get a conduit under a driveway than a huge DB machine. I'm boarding a flight, but look up using water (dig a pit on either side of the road, attach water hose to piece of conduit, and push the conduit under the driveway using the water to erode a hole as you go.)
The there are also smaller hydraulic ram tools designed for pushing a pipe under a driveway.
Probably should have mentioned that it's not a driveway in the US sense, where it's a strip of pavement with dirt on either side. More like a courtyard that butts up against the main house and guesthouse. There's no digging under it from the side.
I would guess directional boring. They can start a bore and sort of drive it around corners.
20 years ago when they were putting fiber in all over the place here, they would bore around a whole cul-de-sac in one go. In several cases breaking every water service line on their way through.
most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.
"Technical" isn't the issue. 200 year old stone houses are the issue. If you can't punch through it with wifi (and thus have this issue), I expect you're not going to be able to poke a cable through either.
For an example, to get from my house router to my office, you'd need to punch through a 3 foot cobble & mortar wall, trench across 30 feet of poured concrete (and tidy it up somehow), punch through another 3 foot thick stone wall, then "pull cable" up to the office. There's an old phone line from A to B that went in 30 years ago when the place was first renovated, but you can tug on it all you like and it's not going anywhere.
If I'd seen this article a few years ago, my life would have been a lot easier.
Yeah, it'd have to be something like that, and nomatter how well you did it, it'd be noticeable.
Fortunately, (as I mentioned in another thread,) I got a powerful enough point-to-point wifi connection to blast through the stone walls and get decent results.
The holes are already made if there are phone cables going in every room. The idea is to reroute ethernet cables through the same holes and guides and replace the sockets.
It is the same when fiber is installed in an old house, you usually reuse tv antenna/phones entries/guides and exit holes.
With old houses you may also have restrictions on what you can do. BT send some to my friends' house every so often to upgrade to FTTP. They say they are going to drill through walls etc. until its pointed out the building is grade II* listed and there are rules and permissions needed at which point they go away.
Phone: I know you probably opened your phone for a reason, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
Me: Maybe Later.
Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
Me: Maybe Later.
Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
... repeat infintely until...
Me: Ok. [Then find the little arrow in the top left corner to get back to phoning].
Extra points for immediately locking my AppleID every time I finally break down and type my password in, forcing an email => browser "unlock your appleID" journey.
Some days I go through this whole experience four times in a row before it finally settles down. Then I make the classic blunder of opening one of my iPads and the whole thing starts again on both devices.
I assume it's just their form of blackmail to force me to upgrade to their 2FA thing so that they can finally lock me out of my old devices for good.
It's the Survival Crafting RPG you would have played on your Apple II back in the 80's.
You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based ui of the old Ultima games.
It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot.
I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. Let me know what you think!
Just wanted to let you know that for me, on FF and Chrome, your blog is rendering rgba(235, 235, 235, 0.64) text on white BG, and I'd really like to be able to read it.
Edit: Also immediately reminds me a bit of UnReal World[1], in a good way
And thanks for the rgba value. It looks like a vestigal remnant of a dark mode theme that got pulled along over the years. A fix is working its way out to the server now.
Automatic de-duplication of photos with the same name
I recently went through a year’s worth of photos from my wife’s phone, and found three distinct “img_0001.jpg”’s just in that single year. Apple’s naming convention is so short sighted that I’d be terrified letting a piece of software try to dedupe it “by name “
The above is an unrealistic example, but, you can't achieve that with the style attribute. You'd have to go into your stylesheet and put this inside the @media query for the right screen size + dark mode, with :hover, etc.
And you'd still need to have a class on the element (how else are you going to target that element)?
And then 6 months later you get a ticket to change it to blue instead. You open up the HTML, you look at the class of the element to remind yourself of what it's called, then you go to the CSS looking for that class, and then you make the change. Did you affect any other elements? Was that class unique? Do you know or do you just hope? Eh just add a new rule at the bottom of the file with !important and raise a PR, you've got other tickets to work on. I've seen that done countless times working in teams over the past 20 years - over a long enough timeline stylesheets all tend to end up a mess of overrides like that.
If you just work on your own, that's certainly a different discussion. I'd say Tailwind is still useful, but Tailwind's value really goes up the bigger the team you're working with. You do away with all those !important's and all those random class names and class naming style guide discussions.
I used to look at Tailwind and think "ew we were supposed to do CSS separate from HTML why are we just throwing styles back in the HTML". Then I was forced to use it, and I understood why people liked it. It just makes everything easier.
Front end development got taken over by the Enterprise Java camp at some point, so now there is no html and css. There’s 10,000 components, and thus nothing that can be styled in a cascading way.
All these arguments are just disconnects between that camp and the oldskool that still writes at least some html by hand.
When I get sucked into react land for a gig, it starts making sense to just tell this particular div tag to have 2px of padding because the piece of code I’m typing is the only thing that’s ever going to emit it.
Then I go back to my own stuff and lean on css to style my handful of reusable pieces.
It has the same effect though. A few bad actors using this “free” thing can end up driving the cost up enough that Microsoft will have to start charging for it.
The jerks get their free things for a while, then it goes away for everyone.
I think the jerks are the ones who bought and enshittified GitHub after it had earned significant trust and become an important part of FOSS infrastructure.
Scoping it to a local maxima, the only thing worse than git is github. In an alternate universe hg won the clone wars and we are all better off for it.
Why do you blame MS for predictably doing what MS does, and not the people who sold that trust & FOSS infra to MS for a profit? Your blame seems misplaced.
And out of curiosity, aside from costing more for some people, what’s worse exactly? I’m not a heavy GitHub user, but I haven’t really noticed anything in the core functionality that would justify calling it enshittified.
Probably the worst thing MS did was kill GitHub’s nascent CI project and replace it with Azure DevOps. Though to be fair the fundamental flaws with that approach didn’t really become apparent for a few years. And GitHub’s feature development pace was far too slow compared to its competitors at the time. Of course GitHub used to be a lot more reliable…
Now they’re cramming in half baked AI stuff everywhere but that’s hardly a MS specific sin.
MS GitHub has been worse about DMCA and sanctioned country related takedowns than I remember pre acquisition GitHub being.
I don't blame them uniquely. I think it's a travesty the original GitHub sold out, but it's just as predictable. Giant corps will evilly make the line go up, individual regular people will have a finite amount of money for which they'll give up anything and everything.
As for how the site has become worse, plenty of others have already done a better job than I could there. Other people haven't noticed or don't care and that's ok too I guess.
They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote.
They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.
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