rpgoldman

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• Commented on The Wrong Trousers
  Actually, I am middle aged with lower back pain and I love my North Face laptop-carrying backpack to death. The key is to actually use the chest strap --- it moves all the weight forward and off the position that...
• Commented on "Why are your houses so heavy?"
  FWIW, there was an interesting, much more humane approach to prefabricated housing here in the US, based on Prairie School ideas inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement. That movement seems to me to have created a lot of very...
• Commented on Obsolete before it ships
  I was pleased to discover that Amazon US has this available for pre-order Right Now......
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  With respect to the sociopathic nature of corporations, in the US at least, this has gotten worse relatively recently. Relatively recently, we have a new branch of corporate ethics (that seems to have legal bite), holding that the only responsibility...
• Commented on Utopia
  Charlie, is this: Also, communism's unsung triumph is that it is the system we use for roughly 75% of our social interactions -- those that take place outside the marketplace, between family members and close friends. (Or do you believe...
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  This makes it sound a lot easier than it is. There's a huge amount of inertia in the process of weight loss. Your body attempts to maintain your body weight, and it will fight very hard to keep you from...
• Commented on Cars (again)
  Living arrangements like these aren't just simple lifestyle choices. For one thing, there's a huge amount of inertia. Those exurbs are not going to go away. They may turn into slums, but the housing stock is going to be there...
• Commented on The hard edge of empire
  For what it's worth, it seems to me that Pullman's young adult books --- the ones starting with The Ruby in the Smoke, in particular --- come close to presenting the steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the...
• Commented on Sheepskin
  Your claims may be true about athletics, but typically engineering and science research do not steal resources from education. Education and science provide a funding stream to research universities that's largely orthogonal. I think there's a sense that science and...
• Commented on Sheepskin
  Charlie, you say: Meanwhile, individual workers may find that their increased earnings from acquiring the employment credentials leave them behind their peers who skipped out on higher education and went straight into a trade. Is this really true? ISTR reading...