Short and To The Point runs smooth like an old tractor

A sweet sweet 1970s tractor

Takao Yamada

Jan 16, 2020

This Week in Our Dumb World

Two Textbooks and Two Americas

I’m not saying that the internet and cable news haven’t damaged our politics and our brains (because they clearly have), but reading through the wild differences in these two textbooks, it becomes easy to see where our two different political worlds develop and how deeply ingrained they become.

The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides.
Hundreds of differences — some subtle, others extensive — emerged in a New York Times analysis of eight commonly used American history textbooks in California and Texas, two of the nation’s largest markets.
In a country that cannot come to a consensus on fundamental questions — how restricted capitalism should be, whether immigrants are a burden or a boon, to what extent the legacy of slavery continues to shape American life — textbook publishers are caught in the middle. On these questions and others, classroom materials are not only shaded by politics, but are also helping to shape a generation of future voters.
Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers. In a September speech, President Trump warned against a “radical left” that wants to “erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology.”
The left has pushed for students to encounter history more from the ground up than from the top down, with a focus on the experiences of marginalized groups such as enslaved people, women and Native Americans.
The books The Times analyzed were published in 2016 or later and have been widely adopted for eighth and 11th graders, though publishers declined to share sales figures. Each text has editions for Texas and California, among other states, customized to satisfy policymakers with different priorities.

This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful

This is a fantastic look at the myriad structural reasons that it is so damn difficult for any local government to develop and improve large infrastructure projects. Yes, money is always a problem, but it’s fascinating to look at all the barriers that have been erected and why.
I will read anything that embraces Robert Moses slander. He is one of the secret villains of American history and his legacy deserves every hit that can be written.

Since the mid-1960s—really since the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island—no major new piece of public infrastructure has been built within the five boroughs of New York City. New York has managed to rebuild when bridges and subways failed and, in the case of the World Trade Center, when buildings were destroyed by terrorists. A handful of new subway stops have opened on Second Avenue, and the 7 Line was extended into Manhattan’s Far West Side. Gov. Andrew Cuomo managed to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge. And he’s rebuilding terminals at Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. But those changes are a pittance of what New York once built year upon year, and just a fraction of the public infrastructure a booming city demands. The subway system is falling apart. Entire neighborhoods are transit deserts. Century-old tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey are beginning to fail.
Why aren’t there new subway lines connecting impoverished corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens? Why does freight traveling from New Jersey to Long Island travel by truck across Manhattan and not by rail? Why does the Port Authority Bus Terminal languish amid calls for an upgrade? Why does luxury housing sprout like weeds while institutions that serve the middle and working classes are left to languish? Why, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a letter to Gov. George Pataki in 1995, does it seem as though America has “lost the touch for famous things”?
Penn Station, like so much of the region’s infrastructure, remains in tatters today not because men like Robert Moses are no longer on the scene, but because the system in which Moses operated has been replaced by an entirely new, and remarkably dysfunctional, architecture. Beneath America’s deep frustration with government is something else: a deep-seated aversion to power. Progressives resolved decades ago to prevent the public from being bulldozed by another Robert Moses—and the project to diffuse power to the public has succeeded. But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The left’s zeal to hamstring government has helped to burnish the right’s argument that government would mess up a one-car parade. The newprotectionserected to guard against Moses’ second coming have condemned new generations to live in civic infrastructure that is frozen in time.

Everyone Wants A 40-Year-Old Tractor

So… I will never buy a Tesla.

If you want one, that’s totally your business! They’re cool! They don’t use gas! No judgments.

But, all that said, I will never buy a Tesla.

This largely traces back to the first time I ever sat in a Tesla X. I marveled at all the design features (the wing doors are so goddamn cool), and my proud owner friend turned on the car and showed me the dashboard. It is a giant touchscreen pad. It was beautiful, and my brain screamed as alarm bells immediately went off in my head.

I love my iPad. It is a fabulous piece of technology that serves as an integral part of my work and leisure life. I carry it around with me like an appendage. Also, sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes the screen is greasy, and sometimes it’s just buggy, sometimes the recent software update doesn’t quite work. But that’s fine. There’s other things I can use. It’ll be fine in a bit. I don’t care that sometimes it’s buggy because it’s a tablet and not the thing that I’m driving myself and/or my family around in.

Because Tesla’s are sleek and wonderful cars that are just super elaborate hardware systems for very complex software, they are the fanciest iPad. Now, this has enormous benefits. It allows your car to be constantly updated with every new program and development. Better parking assist? New maps? Better traffic and navigational AI? These all arrive immediately without a trip to the dealer. So that’s great.

But I don’t trust any software so much that I want it to brick my car when it gets buggy.

Not to mention the fact that you can never really own a car that is this software dependant. The company can always decide to hold you hostage over the next software update. They can always decide that mandatory software updates now cost one, five, or ten thousand dollars. Is this my little paranoia corner? Probably. But if you’re asking me to trust any company to turn down that money forever, then you’re far more optimistic than I am.

And if you think that this is all me being ridiculous and surely this brilliant company has thought all this stuff though, I would remind you that Tesla’s don’t come with spare tires. At all.

Also, go look at that ridiculous truck.

On a related note, farmers are buying 40-year-old tractors because they work better and aren’t software and dependant on complex (and expensive) professional maintenance to fix every problem.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.
“It’s a trend that’s been building. It’s been interesting in the last couple years, which have been difficult for ag, to see the trend accelerate,” said Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, a farm equipment data company in Rochester with a website and TV show.
“There’s an affinity factor if you grew up around these tractors, but it goes way beyond that,” Peterson said. “These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.”

The story of how the Space Jam website is fun, but it’s not as fun as going to the 1996 Space Jam website WHICH IS STILL WORKING.

Yes, you should read the article, but also you should take a trip to the 1996 internet and marvel at how far we have come.

By that fall, Buckley’s crew was a fully operational, smooth-running gaggle of coding revolutionaries. Their office bible wasn’t the notes they received from Warner Bros.’ consumer products division but rather Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days, an indispensable 800-page beast of a book that became more tattered and dog-eared as time went on. (Tritter still has his personal copy on his home office bookshelf.) They had mastered the basics, Twister had fostered their creative spirit, and once Braun hired her fall design intern, a University of Cincinnati undergrad named Andrew Stachler, the core team was now assembled and ready to tackle its most ambitious project to date: Space Jam.
To hype the site, Braun and Tritter designed a placeholder site, done up in the style of an old subway station, with Space Jam movie posters adorning the background and a subway car full of Looney Tunes characters. It proved to be exceedingly difficult to execute – “a nightmare,” Tritter remembers – with its meticulously coded tables and pixel spacers. Alas, the placeholder page has been lost to history.
But the rest of the actual Space Jam site, which is what you see today, was a more gratifying experience for Buckley’s team. The opening galaxy of icons is both minimalist and cartoonish but with functional site section names: Jam Central for movie facts and filmmaker bios, Lunar Tunes for soundtrack info, Stellar Souvenirs for sound clips and screen savers, and so on. Even today, with its basic HTML, pre-broadband file sizes, and Flash-free architecture, the site is easy to navigate, even on a mobile phone. The movie clips, encoded in QuickTime, are somewhat grainy but still viewable. Nothing was designed to still work after 19 years; it was simply designed to work.