It's further north than a small part of Canada, but Michigan is lake effect central, and the Detroit metro is a heat island. It's not usually that bad during the winter, but it does snow.
I’ve lived in Michigan most of my life. I always hear people talk about lake effect snow, but it doesn’t seem that bad. I shoveled maybe 6 or 7 times this past winter and only bothered to pull out the snow blower one or two times. Even when I lived on the west side of the state, it wasn’t that bad. I only remember one time where is snowed about a foot… the roads were cleared and the rest of the winter was pretty uneventful.
There are some areas up in the UP that are bad, but very few people live there and they know what they’re signing up for.
Meanwhile, the people I know who live in NJ got wrecked by snow repeatedly this year, multiple feet at a time. I don’t recall ever getting anything like that around Detroit.
I live just west of Lake Michigan, and what you described would be a high-snow winter here. The lake effect is real. I grew up in the Cleveland area, and I was surprised how much less snow we get in Wisconsin. Longer, colder winters, though.
I lived in Chicagoland for a few years as well, I didn’t notice much of a difference. I would assume that’s similar to Wisconsin.
Of course, I was in apartments with covered parking and snow removal services the whole time, so I didn’t need to care too much.
I do remember the guys in the Chicago office talking about when they got a foot or so of snow and had to walk to the nearby hotel to spend the night, because it wasn’t safe to drive home. I heard stories like that from people in the Michigan office too, but in my 20 years working I still never ran into it. Just lucky I guess.
Lake effect precipitation effects the entire Midwest, but the temperature moderation predominantly effect the peninsulas. We did get more than a foot on the ground earlier, but it all melted, then froze again, then 70 degrees, now 20... the weather is crazy everywhere.
Not even areas really, just activities. Don't get involved in gangs or drugs and you'll never have any problem. One nice thing about the Motor City is that sidewalks are empty, because if you had any money you would be driving. I've walked and biked all around the city and metro, you're more likely to be hurt by a pothole on a street with no lights than by muggers or whatever people are afraid of.
It's humid and muggy in the warm months and windy/rainy/snowy/cold otherwise. You have to be climatically adapted and motivated to walk around outside most of the year. Plus, car culture is a big thing ("Motor City") so everybody drives and there's next to no funding for public transit. There are sidewalks, there are walking and biking paths that cover a surprising area, but the number of things in walkable distance is very location-dependent.
The weather needs to be your biggest consideration. Cars get eaten alive by salt and you'll need one for sure. It's cold 6 months a year and in the winter you get like 8 hours of sunlight, while you're at work. If you are used to warmer climates you'll probably hate it. It is cheap though, if money is your thing.
A straightforward rendition of the last 10 years wouldn't even pass the smell test for a satire. It might work as some kind of experimental dark slapstick.
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
some ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
Yes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
I've seen two people with the same name and birthday, in different departments of the same building. Caused regular problems with management and HR.
I've also seen two different customers with the same name and phone number - the number got recycled and went to second one while the first hadn't updated their number on file. We had to tell them apart by address.
Pointers aren't hard, it's C/C++ that make them complicated. Addresses and indirection in any assembly language are simple and straightforward, easy and even intuitive once you start actually writing programs.
They are though! Indirection in assembly is just something like:
ldr dest, [src, offset]
It's straightforward and pretty hard to mess up, and easy to read to because the format is consistent.
Whereas in C all the following are valid (and it becomes even more confusing with assignment in the declaration statement, tons of footguns and weird syntax):
int* a;
int *a;
int a[];
int a[5];
Assignment is weird too, especially because dereferencing and defining a pointer both use '*'.
*a = c;
a[0] = c;
Then you have structs/unions and their members, and what if those are pointers? You get . and -> syntax. It's weird and complicated, much much more complicated than assembly. That's before you get to casting and types which make C much more complicated than assembly for doing low level stuff.
I used to think I was incapable of learning "real" programming because I didn't get C. When I later read a book on programming in assembly, I realized that everything that had felt so complex was actually not so difficult. C pointer syntax is weird and doesn't parse naturally for many people, especially programming novices who might not yet have a solid grasp on what/how/why they're doing anything.
In addition to more space, having only one foreground application really reduces distractions and visual clutter. Also, for some reason I am comfortable using larger fonts on phones and tablets, which makes doing lots of reading easier than on my laptop.
Have you looked over the shoulder of somebody trying to "do" something on their phone recently?
If so you might have noticed the constant pings and notifications from dating apps, news sites, random games and cool-apps-that-you've-long-forgotten-but-still-have-location-and-background-services-turned-on.
That's not just interruptions. It's the notifications bar itself.
I noticed this only recently - I switched the default phone launcher to a scifi theme built on Total Launcher (there's legit personal research project reasons behind that, it's not just to look cool!) and after few days (and a bunch of missed messages), I realized my life seems suspiciously light in interruptions and random events. It took me a few more moments to pin-point the reason: the theme hid the notification bar entirely. It was still there, ready to pull down and expand with a gesture or a button tap - but that top line with icons was not visible (and through the stroke of luck, I misconfigured something in another experiment and had no notification indicators on the lock screen, either).
Not having notification indicators visible on any surface is really all it took - and conversely, this means that just having them there created the majority of the burden for me. I thought I successfully solved the distraction problem by silencing or eliminating ads and useless notifications, but now I know that even the important ones aren't really that important for the burden their very existence creates.
Android modes provide control over notification display.
Modes control which people and apps can trigger a sound/vibration, but also offer the option to hide the silenced notifications from the status bar, pull-down shade, and dots on app icons. I hide them from the status bar, but not the pull-down shade so that I can manually check if I want to, but don't see them at a glance.
I'm not a heavy user of this feature though; I mostly don't install apps that have spammy notifications.
Right. I'm saying that living for a week without any notification bar at all made me realize that even my usual well-curated notification bar is impacting me much more than I realized.
I imagine usage patterns vary greatly. For me, most of the time, I have it set to only allow messages from contacts, and I usually handle those immediately.
I mean, some, sure. but it's a choice, and not all choose to do that. and I've watched quite a few (of all ages) escape it when they realize how much it's harming their ability to do what they need to do.
This is the first time I've heard someone say a smartphone reduces distractions.
As a millennial boomer, I prefer my triple monitor setup and mechanical keyboard, not to mention network- and client-level content blockers, whenever I have to input more than a sentence.
I was at a conference last week, and I took notes in a fullscreened GNU Nano. Distractions, ADHD, etc. Did get some odd looks, but I couldn't imagine taking notes without an actual keyboard. I'm not an ultra fast typer, but I'm decent - I'd challenge any thumb typer on MonkeyType.
I don't have any social apps or games on my phone. Other than the web browser there's nothing to distract me. I find it so easy to get caught up in checking the news or email or the episode of that show I was watching on my laptop, but I don't do any of those things habitually on my phone or tablet or reader so that's my "distraction free" device.
That's only for reading though! For taking notes I go with a real keyboard or pencil and paper whenever I have the choice.
similar here, I'm gradually removing more and more things from my phone. at this point it's mostly just a couple actually-important apps, a web browser, and messaging apps (because it's clearly superior to whipping out a laptop for brief things). "social" outside messaging is in the web browser or not on the phone at all. if I want to focus I just turn on Do Not Disturb for an hour.
browsing is slowly reducing as time goes on too, as while it's convenient on my phone, it's rarely efficient. it doesn't take long at all before I'd rather pull out a laptop and finish more quickly.
I suspect they also wanted to distract from the Epstein files and probably expected some domestic "rally around the flag" effect. The first seems to be mostly successful for now, the second not as much.
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