If you have a library anywhere nearby, you don't need to worry about purchasing and selling individual books. Over they years they have gotten even more lenient with long loan periods, online renewals, mostly eliminated late fees, and (depending on where you live) returns at any library location within a regional system.
My Ukrainian town used to have 3 libraries. Now the only library here is a school one. The reason so much libraries have got destroyed is the censourship. Now Ukrainian govt makes some active progress into censourship of anything printed by Russian language. Since most of the books accumulated for dozens of years were not yet prohibited but definitely unwanted - now I have no libraries at all.
I am very happy to hear that old and cool libraries are still a thing somewhere.
I use to teach local kids how to get pirated books with no DRM but I have a feeling that they will never use my recommendation. They just open their first page with no animated pictures and get lost immediately, their eyes are not even moving through the text in a proper way. They look to me like when I see some new musical instrument which I can not play because I have not observed it earlier.
Contacts might be fine, but I don't know of any company that would allow an employee to sync work email messages and attachments to an unsanctioned third party, let alone retain access after termination.
Lets look at Singapore, a well developed and highly planned urban city state with many well utilized parks and green spaces, highly walkable as well as having a world-class public transport network, located on the equator, with 75%+ humidity and a high UV index for most of the day.
The vast majority of playgrounds are entirely unsheltered.
I can confirm, we ”analyzed” the color of the curtains in some novel I now forget. I believe they were, in fact, blue. The teacher was adamant details like that were always meaningful and certainly not just to paint a scene. It was far from the only instance of such “analysis”.
What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
>What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'.
[0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another.
[1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
> What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
Same in german. Die Leiden des jungen Werther - dry, boring, irrelevant.
And even this is selling Singapore’s policy and procedure short.
On top of those broader measures listed and the general level of public cleaning/maintenance, there’s reporting of every dengue infection diagnosed along with the individual’s home address and particulars to the National Environmental Agency. Cases and trends are monitored for developing clusters, publicly publishing up-to-date findings and exact numbers. Where a cluster is found, they do additional anti-mosquito fogging and significantly increase the local public awareness campaign (huge banners, posters in every elevator, distribute leaflets, etc).
They then send agents unannounced to inspect inside every home/unit in the area for any potential breeding grounds. Everything is checked from potted plant trays to dish drying racks to toilet bowl scrubber holders. If any breeding is found, there’s fines in the thousands of dollars. The agents are empowered to enter without a warrant; it’s taken THAT seriously.
The NEA also monitors and takes appropriate action against non-residential areas like construction sites, where standing water is hard to eliminate unless it’s a priority.
Very. In simple terms there's just a lot more of Brazil to deal with.
Brazil is a massive 8,514,215 km2 while Singapore is just a tiny 734 km2 island which is very highly urbanised and developed and doesn't have a significant rural population (hence the description of "city-state").
Its small enough that you can monitor mozzie levels at the individual building level, and locate and deal with breeding spots at that level too. That might also be practical in urban areas in Brazil, but for rural areas I suspect is not feasible?
Just look at the map of Singapore. It doesn't matter how hard they try, there is malay jungle maybe 1km from the city. Unless its getting the same treatment for another 10km from the border, or they somehow raise star trek shields between it, little buggers can easily find their way to the city even if city itself is sterilized.
Singapore had 8 thousand cases in 2022. Brazil has 3 million cases of dengue in 2024.Is not the same thing. The poor distribution of water and the lack of sewage are fundamental to dengue fever in Brazil.
Had such inspections before whenever kena red zone here.
As well as checking all these things the agent will advise on what to look out for. For example our unused plastic buckets in the bathroom are upside down so they don't accumulate water, ah! but then also must check that little rim channel as it too can also accumulate enough water from nearby splashing to become a breeding spot!
SG also has Zika which transmits via Aedes mosquitos.
The common corridors in many blocks also have "Gravitraps" they use to monitor numbers by counting how many mozzies get trapped.
Brazil too have notification with the numbers published weekly by each State of the country, all cases are notified even without laboratory confirmation. They too have zoonosis agents which inspect locations, but they're not allowed to enter without warrant.
>They then send agents unannounced to inspect inside every home/unit in the area for any potential breeding grounds. Everything is checked from potted plant trays to dish drying racks to toilet bowl scrubber holders. If any breeding is found, there’s fines in the thousands of dollars. The agents are empowered to enter without a warrant; it’s taken THAT seriously.
Came here to say this. I lived in SG for 14 years, we had the "mosquito police" show up to our office (shophouse in Emerald hill) and do an inspection.
If you're getting mosquitoes in your place, you can call the NEA and they'll send people out looking for the source.
Grass is mowed religiously in Singapore to help keep the mosquitoes under control and there's always a ton of spraying. During COVID lockdowns, a lot of the lawn guys were stuck in the dormitories so the grass got tall. Also, the coconut palms went untrimmed. The morning walks became fraught with danger as the palms were overloaded with coconuts and were consistently falling onto the footpaths. I know COVID sucked for a lot of people, but I find a weird sense of nostalgia for that time.
I would think noticeable permanent taste or texture alterations should disqualify an item from things you can freeze. If that’s acceptable… then nearly everything “can be frozen”.
I don’t think it means you work a full day, but that you bill a minimum of a full day for any weekend work.
A while back I worked at a consultancy that typically billed using a 15-minute granularity during standard office hours, reasonably rounded up/down. Unless otherwise contracted, outside of office hours the granularity increased to 1 hour rounded up. A 5 minute fix would be billed as an hour, a 65 minute fix as 2 hours, etc. It was also only undertaken for emergencies; general work requests would be done the next business day.
Generally all contracts were budgeted some number of hours per billing cycle per service. N full-time engineers would be converted to an equivalent amount of hours for the budget.
The result was that overtime was used judiciously and clients were rarely insisted on pushing big changes near the end of a day or on Fridays.
I absolutely love A, B, C; they're critical to my project, the maintainers put pour their own time and effort in, and I want to make sure they get my support. Dep D is pretty good and I wouldn't mind throwing a bit their way too. E is some wrapper lib (or maybe a company-backed package) that I don't care to support monetarily.
Since I want to support 60-80% of my deps, something like StackAid sounds attractive; I don't have to set up and maintain individual (potentially recurring) donations to each. I set up $100/mo to be distributed, feel good about doing my part, and go back to work.
Turns out, only E is collecting their StackAid, for whatever reason. My $100/mo is all going to them. Nothing is going to any of the others, let alone the packages I definitely wanted to support in the first place. I think I've donated, so I don't think to seek projects' alternative donation channels to get the money into their pockets, so they don't see a dime.
The only solution is to go through all of my dependencies to see which ones are actively using StackAid and decide if it's a sufficient set before donating through them.
It seems very unlikely, in the long run, that people/projects that need it would leave reliable income on the table. Maybe this problem exists until people know what stackaid is, but I have a hard time believing this is an issue with the model, generally.
