I am not sure about that. Windows, Linux based devices were like that but for a lot of things like gaming consoles etc. you were locked into the ecosystem and 'side loading" was indeed something.
I do understand developer mindset but I would be pretty unhappy if my mother's phone could just install stuff. A lot of people get harmed and lose their life's saving over wrongly installed crap.
A good middle ground for the Big Tech is to let folks pay $$, a money that is high enough and has sufficient friction.
That isn't even true about gaming consoles. They were completely open in the 90s and before. The consoles even lost lawsuits keeping it open. For newer consoles, a modchip doesn't side load, it enables normal loading without the drm check.
Bypassing/disabling drm would not be called sideloading.
If anything, the app store would be the sideload because they are loading the installer via a middleman instead of downloading the installer and running it yourself like normal.
The whole promise of engineering is not to build a bridge that stands but to build a bridge that barely stands. It is not a good idea to build a bridge that last 500 years. You likely destroyed valuable resources to build one. Build a bridge that lasts 100 years and save those resources. In 100 years the technology to build bridges improves so much that it is lot easier to build a new one. At least in most countries like India.
We don't build better bridges than we did 200 years ago? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it seems like we build bridges right now that would have been unthinkable 200 years ago
Nobody is going to tear down old bridges and rebuild them at enormous costs just because technology changed. Some things can't or won't be redone and so it's worth it to build it to last and getting it right on the first try.
This is exactly what we did with houses, buildings. We had perfectly functional 100+ years old fully functional, gorgeous buildings and we replaced those with brutalist concrete/glass barely functional garbage.
In Europe we have plenty of old buildings. The good ones (i.e. made by very wealthy people) tend to be decent, with a skew towards huge living rooms but tiny rooms. The cheaper ones are a mess to mantain: cold in winter, hot in summer, expensive to renovate (it could be more expensive to renovate than to build a new one), bad to no isolation, in my region terribly humid, usually too dark with minuscule windows for modern standards.
With roman buildings that last 2000 thousand years we are looking at survivor bias. Near me there are some roman ruins from a (cheap and small) public bath that are barely distiguishable from a pile of bricks. The are some nearby pre-roman ruins in better shape.
You need to actually reduce draft a bit (often old houses like mine tend to accumulate flaws that the elderly living there before didn't fix anymore.)
and use a heating sources that matches.
Having a fireplace is fine. It could overheat the house whilst also keeping air dryer and it's essentially renewable (compared to the alternatives and houses made of more plastic insulation than anything else) if you don't mind air quality dip in winter.
That said i can see how that's no longer an option in places that have drastically increased their population
Fireplace is extremely inefficient, and really bad for both your (exhaust fumes get into the room anyway), and your neighbors (the smoke doesn't just dissappear) health, though.
I love the heat and smell of a good fire as much as the next guy, I'm just not sure it's worth the risk of cancer and respiratory diseases.
If exhaust fumes get into the room too often you're doing it wrong. You shouldn't be able to smell it inside.
I've at times made the fire go a little harder to get rid of fumes (kitchen oopsies). My air quality measurer found it remarkably effective.
As for neighbors. That is true but at the same time these things are rather sustainable and from a time when the population density was lower. I think they still have some place outside of cities untill heatpumps come down in price.
If efficiency is important, like if you are using wood for primary heat, you should at a minimum be using a sealed box stove which should be pretty efficient and have little to no smoke escaping.
Alternatly you could just use an outdoor stove that merely heat exchanges to the inside.
The insulation is the easiest to add to old buildings.
Red bricks offer better thermal insulation than dense standard concrete. Because of their porous clay structure, red bricks absorb heat slowly during the day and release it at night.
Solid concrete blocks, conversely, are highly conductive and absorb/transfer heat much faster, usually requiring added insulation.
We could just fix the insulation where it is bad instead of tear down the entire housing unit and rebuild it with concrete / glass / metal.
They weren't torn down because there was better technology available. They were torn down because they were falling apart, or were no longer meeting the needs in that location. I love old buildings – my house is 250 years old – but there's no denying that generally they are less suited to current needs than newer buildings.
Older buildings are generally more flexible though.
In the UK, within living memory electricity has become widely available, TV has, gas, internet etc etc. and yet we still build houses without the assumption that some cable isn't going to be modified in the wall some how.
There's fairly modern houses that didnt have the 2 courses of brick added to the loft to allow 300mm of insulation to be installed.
We are now building houses with gas boilers, knowing that they will have to be swapped out probably before the life of the boiler runs out. And I bet the radiators and piping aren't sized to make that possible. That the circuit isn't sized for that.
Yes none of this is easier in a 250 year old house, but it isn't harder and 250 year old houses hadn't really changed appreciably for a few centuries so it isn't as if there would be an expectation that you would be installing new things in the wall every decade.
When we bought our house, the only plumbing was in a tiny, asbestos-filled lean-to extension added in the 1940s that contained the kitchen, bathroom and toilet. The way people use houses has changed a lot in the past 100 years
But we are currently doing it when a bridge can't handle modern traffic levels because it was designed thinking in 50's traffic (single lane for each direction without peatón or bicycle ways to 4 or 6 lanes and pedestrian and bicycle ways).
Modern concrete includes plastic fibers like polypropylene, fly ash (a great source of arsenic, lead, and mercury), silica fume, formaldehyde, and often even PFAS
This type of concrete does not give us any more flexibility in the future to rebuild or upgrade because doing anything to it could turn it into an environmental and public health hazard
Intial folks in gold rush benefits. Later folks don't. It happens everywhere. This weak junior hiring was seen by everyone 10 years ago when our politicians were asking coal miners to learn to code.
United states does not need buses ! What might benefit is smaller vans that do more intelligent routing than fixed bus routes. Unfortunately city admins run bus services as jobs programs for adults and not for the convenience of the people. Buses get funded by taxes and not fare collection and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
> and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
Demonstrably untrue, if you were to look at taxis, ubers, lyfts, and ... small vans that operate exactly as you describe, in many large cities. (In NYC, I know there exists such a van network in Brooklyn, and near the George Washington Bridge running across the river.)
And besides, buses have advantages that "intelligent routing"-based vans - predictability and reliability. If I need to get somewhere by bus, I know exactly which stop I need to go to, and usually when the bus is scheduled to arrive to pick me up, and also to drop me off.
(Granted, sometimes those times aren't right, but they usually are, most of the time.)
Confirmed: the van network in Brooklyn exists, a ride still costs $2 (compared to $3 on an MTA bus), the vans / minibuses largely follow popular bus routes, and stop basically anywhere along the route where it is safe, including on a red light.
I've ridden collectivo type vans in a number of latin america countries (Philippines has same although sometimes in form of jeepnee), they work quite well, you shout 'para' or some such where you need to stop and wave boldly when you need to get on. Much prefer it to a bus, and also since they are privately owned it is very easy to kick assholes off which is one of my biggest gripes with dealing with public transit.
City buses aren't profitable. There's no fare that would cover costs. Your choices aren't to have a subsidized government bus service or have competitive private bus services, your choices are to have a subsidized government bus service or have no bus service.
Don't discount the ability of political extremists to discount even the evidence they see themselves (or reframe it massively), if it conflicts with their agenda.
It was interesting to see shops in the border towns of south & south east Switzerland buying & selling products from Italy, a relatively cheaper market.
I mean, when I was young we lived in Poland right next to the border with Slovakia and we'd drive over once a week for groceries and to buy fuel because it was just so much cheaper over there. Nowadays it's the reverse since they got the Euro - most Polish shops near the border cater to Slovakian shoppers and even accept Euro for payment.
American here. My experience is that the US dollar seems to be accepted in tons of stores in countries all over in the Americas Europe and Asia. Trade is trade it seems.
Seller sold forward contracts to recoup tariffs at a lower price and passed on the benefits to the consumers already. E.g. For every $1 seller paid as tariffs, seller sold a contract to someone for $0.25 saying if government ever refunds the buyer of the contract can keep it. The $0.25 already passed to consumers as benefits.
> Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
Not to the specific customer but this benefits will now get passed to future customers as prices will be lowered than usual (lower than pre-tariff prices) due to competition.
Note that consumers who paid more were not necessarily paying the tariffs. Stores like Costco, Walmart increased prices across the board and socialized the impact of tariffs. Even if there was some mechanism to return tariff money to consumer, there is no way you could return it to someone who paid higher due to this socialized nature of price increase.
I am not sure about that. Windows, Linux based devices were like that but for a lot of things like gaming consoles etc. you were locked into the ecosystem and 'side loading" was indeed something.
I do understand developer mindset but I would be pretty unhappy if my mother's phone could just install stuff. A lot of people get harmed and lose their life's saving over wrongly installed crap.
A good middle ground for the Big Tech is to let folks pay $$, a money that is high enough and has sufficient friction.
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