I disagree as an American heterosexual guy who has many female friends.
It works the same way any friendship works with the same sex for heterosexual men. I have positively no desire to sleep with my closest male friends, but they are my friends because we challenge each other, support each other or just otherwise get along and have similar interests (preach to the choir to each other).
Of my female friends, my emotional/sexual desire ranges. I opt for transparency. I don't do booty calls or casual sex because it doesn't work for me. But I have admitted my feelings to several of my female friends (both as "I'm not interested in anything other than a platonic relationship" to get it off the table and the opposite). In one case I dated a close friend for a short stint, and in almost all of the others my feelings were not reciprocated (I think American women where I live anyway don't see long term friends as sexual objects as I have no problems attracting good looking women that are otherwise strangers -- topic for another reply). In all cases, sharing my emotional/sexual feelings strengthened the friendship after a short period of awkwardness. It simply takes the issue off the table.
He seems to argue that it's very difficult to have platonic male/female friendships in a heterosexual context.
Speaking as anecdotally as that article did. My first roommate was a girl. Neither of us wanted to have sex with eachother. It was a shared rent/utilities arrangement and she got the second room because she was the only one of my friends who I would trust to not destroy the place. She was easy to get along with and our relationship was as platonic as it would have been with a guy (I'm straight, to clear that up). Despite [my parent's] faith not allowing such things (rather judgmental Catholic family), they thought it was a great idea because they knew "us" in context and even they saw it as no different than having a same gender roommate (believe me, I agonized explaining the situation to them and was shocked when they outright endorsed it).
Today, I'm just finishing off a divorce. Of my three closest friends, the top two are women that I had lost touch with years ago. Both are exceptionally attractive, single, women (I'm no Brad Pitt, but I've never had a problem attracting, either).
I think the simplest way to have a successful platonic relationship is to be transparent about sex. I think some of us are too insecure to even think of doing that, but it's really not difficult. If you really find your friend attractive, say so. If you previously had feelings for them but do not now, say so. If they're really a meaningful friend, the awkwardness won't last long as long as you're not so hung up on rejection that you can't take getting a "let's be friends". I've done this with both of my two friends, one I simply reassured that I'm not at all interested in a relationship, the other I admitted my attraction to years ago and was not reciprocated. I cherish the friendship of both and after a short time of grousing about the latter relationship, I realized she was right and we'd be a terrible fit.
Now as a divorced man, I'm looking for a roommate. I'm not interested in a relationship beyond friendship and I don't see that changing regardless of the person. I'd consider either one of them (and that is likely to happen at some point in very the near future), but not my best "guy" friend.
When people are applying for a job you can be 99% sure they're motivated by the money
I would challenge the 99% rule (I know it wasn't derived scientifically so I'm not poking fun). Speaking purely from my own experience and my knowledge of two of my coworkers, money is always a factor, but once you get past enough to live comfortably, other factors start to come into play. I don't want a larger house (I'd like to pay it off, instead), I know I probably have a raise coming soon and I don't care how much it is for. About 5 years ago I cut my salary off at $60,000 before taxes. I get paid much more than that, but that's all I see in my main checking account and I'll probably drop that to $40,000 soon (a story for another post, perhaps). My closest coworkers (the ones who are the top performers IMO) feel the same way. The environment is good, the work is fun, the money is enough even though we could all do better elsewhere.
I've been given other offers, some that were very attractive and paid more. I've not accepted them because they tended to be too narrow in what I'd be doing. My job as a corporate drone writing software is fun and rewarding well beyond my salary, I have a great boss and great coworkers and I'd quit and head someplace else for $50,000 if that changed. Maybe I'm not a typical HN reader in that I have no desire to create a start-up (the business side of it is no fun) or work for one (there's no such thing as job security, but it's admittedly worse and while I'm no stranger to "crunch time", my desk will never have a sleeping bag under it).
I'd spend most of my days skiing
Are you sure about that? My dad's life plan was to retire at 35, and he did. His thing was golf, not skiing, and he did a lot of it for half a year before he took his family's retirement savings and purchased a quarter of a small business where he also took a job as the only salesperson. "You can only play so much golf" is the excuse he gave. I don't know his net worth, but he has two homes and one is on a lake that is exceptionally prime real estate. He's past his 60s and still working and I give him another 5 years before he tries to retire again.
I've had been using the Costco Kirkland AAs for a long time, but I stopped last year due to a perceived shelf life issue.
In an attempt to reduce waste, I use a "battery rotation" in my house. They start in the kids toys. When they reach the "flake out" point (this is where the toy starts behaving like it's demon possessed, saying only one or two words of a song, playing it's "music" without anyone touching it, etc), they get tossed into a "drained" box where they are used in IR remote controls or LED flashlights (I have 15 LED flashlights, story in another thread). When the LED flashlights burn through them, I put them in my IR remotes. They last, literally, for months before the IR remotes kill them. Then they get recycled.
The problem I found with the Kirkland over the Energizer and Duracell (and I'll admit my sample size was two of their 48 packs) was that as I got to about the middle of the 48 pack, the unused remaining batteries wouldn't run the toys. They'd light the LED flashlights about as well as the batteries in the drained box. As this happened twice, my guess was that the Kirkland batteries don't have the shelf-life of the Energizers. I don't think it was environmental conditions--all batteries were stored in the same place and went through four seasons. Two 48 packs of Kirkland and I'm on my third 36 pack of Energizers, though I never hooked it up to a device to get an accurate measurement, so take it for what it's worth.
After getting frustrated with the Kirkland's I decided to bite the bullet and go to rechargable. I went with AA and AAA NiMh batteries. My kids have a lot of electronic toys, and they get rotated into and out of use as they get bored with them. I switched to all NiMh (expensive) batteries, last year (not sure if they had the "fix" that was mentioned about the Sanyo batteries but considering how quickly they stopped taking any charge after very few recharges, I'm guessing not). After the kids used the first set of toys (about 16 batteries worth), I stored them for about 2 weeks as usual (turned off, not removed, I know, I know). When I put them back in rotation, they were completely dead (I didn't measure, but I did put two in my Sony TV remote and no dice). This made the batteries worthless. Kids toys made in the last ten years require tools to replace the batteries and my battery charger only holds 4 batteries, so this is an all day ordeal of charging, watching, changing, charging and of course, figuring out how to get past the child-proof battery holder, putting the batteries in wrong or discovering the need to clean the terminals, unscrewing and screwing them back in.
I did find that if the batteries were fully charged prior to storage, they worked after rotation, but it seemed they didn't work very long.
I'd like to be a whole lot less wasteful (both money, time and materials). Does anyone have any experience with a specific brand of rechargable AA and AAA battery that retains most of its current charge when stored for up to 3 weeks not fully charged (I'll even go through the trouble of removing them from the toys if I have no choice), and from a cost perspective make sense for toys that require batteries to have a discharge rate similar to good Alkaline batteries?
In late 2010 I bought "24 Centura AA LSD NiMH Rechargeable Batteries" from eBay (for $33, so just under $1.66 each) -- specifically the long-life kind, that was around when I heard of their existence.
I've used them in remote controls that sat for months and continued to work fine, and in wii-motes for similar periods. I haven't measured the life/performance much more carefully than that. Except I do have a nice LaCrosse charger that measures things and claims to be putting in an average of 2Ah, which compares favorably to the (2300 or 2600 mAh if memory serves) usually inflated rating that they claim.
The trick, though, is that with rechargeables (and especially long-life like these), you keep a small but sufficient stock of charged batteries ready. When something goes dead, the dead batteries go in the charger, and the stock (immediately) goes in the thing. By the time the next thing dies, the previous set is charged and ready.
My domain transfer completed today (interesting, since it said it would complete on Tuesday, but I'll chock it up to volume).
Immediately before the domain transfer, I received an e-mail indicating that GoDaddy was sorry to see my one sad domain go away. I replied asking if there is a way to completely eliminate my account with them.
As I don't expect a reply, does anyone know if GoDaddy provides a way to eliminate your account completely? I'm planning on removing saved Credit Card information and setting a random, max-length password. Far from bullet proof, but I expect I won't be doing business with them again and don't want some random hack to result in account disclosure and some troublemaker deciding to buy a bunch of services in my name. The probability is low, but the amount of anger resulting from this SOPA nonsense has to have made them a bigger target for such nefarious activities ... I'm thinking Sony from recent memory.
While I'm sure this would probably violate all sorts of copyright, I'd love a site that could provide alternate dubbed languages (specifically Spanish, German and Portuguese) for movies.
The dubbing is never quite right or simply not included (for the media I'm looking at purchasing, I always ensure that at least Spanish is covered). I'm using television shows and movies that I have nearly memorized the script to help with "immersion" between more traditional study (I took many years of Spanish and gave up ... this hack wasn't mine, it was mentioned by a coworker and it turned out to be a very clever one). In the US, it's easy to find DVD/BD versions that include Spanish (to a lesser extent, French, which I'm not interested in), but rarely include anything else in the US (and most of the stuff I want to watch includes neither).
This service is intriguing to me. I don't routinely download movies, and I'm unfamiliar with .srt and .sub formats, but I'm wondering if this could help assist reading in another language the same way it has helped in listening/comprehension and it certainly seems like your site is solving a problem I've seen when transcoding DVDs ... it used to be audio mismatch (largely a problem of the past with modern container formats), now it sounds like the same pain point exists with subtitles.
http://www.yabla.com might be what you are looking for -- it's great for learning via subtitled foreign clips. The content isn't dubbed however, rather it's from those countries that speak the language natively.
I was seconds away from updating my status with a quote from that entry... then I saw it was from John Mayer and I realized how much grief and sarcasm I'd get for having posted and linked to the source.
The sad thing is, I like a lot of his music so the fact that I was truly intimidated by posting a link by him for fear of what my friends might think of me probably says more about me than it does him (and perhaps speaks to a bit to why Rdio and Spotify had to add privacy controls). Oh well! I'm intimidated by music snobs, I guess. I'll be intimidating another time.
Don't know much about Mayer, but found it interesting that he deleted the post honoring Steve Jobs after SJ's biography came out and he was quoted as saying that Mayer was "out of control".
He has a habit of deleting almost all of the posts on his tumblr. When he started the account, he actually said he was only going to have one or two posts up at any one time. It's kind of surprising the number he's got up now (although they're almost all photos). The Jobs tribute post could have been deleted out of spite, but he's deleted some other really cool stuff too, so I kinda doubt it.
This is an interesting problem that I think some states in the US have at least partially solved.
The highways in Michigan, for example, are almost all set at 70 MPH (minus those around large cities like Detroit, a point I disagree with). The result has been a dramatic reduction in speeding. I'm not sure if road safety has improved or not since the change, but since I have taken the same way to/from work 5 days a week for 15 years, I can say I haven't seen any increase or decrease in accidents, personally. What I have noticed is a dramatic change in driving behavior. When the limit was 55 MPH, the majority of traffic was going at least 60 with a sizable minority of traffic working very hard to get around those doing 60.
From my personal perspective, 70 MPH feels fast enough. It probably feels that way because I'm not being tailgated at that speed, nor do I feel like I'd have to slow down to take a bend in the road at that speed (my understanding is that the highways in Michigan are designed to be driven safely at 75 MPH in reasonable weather conditions). By casual observation, most people are driving between 65 and 75 MPH outside of rush hour.
The discussions on this post are awesome. So many are judging this is moral terms and from every perspective imaginable.
The two most prevalent are:
"The fight was in public, the world has changed, I have no sympathy"
"I would never live-tweet such a subject, that's an evil invasion of privacy"
We're given amazing tools to interact with others and culture has not advanced as quickly as technology has. Our interactions with other human beings are (and I apologise for the metaphor in advance), like services interacting with other services on a network. Sometimes one service breaks another by accident.
We're connected to everyone else in a different way today than we were 5 years ago (and 5 years ago I would have said 10 years ago). I could see myself over-sharing this sort of thing because it's unusual and because I have a twitter account and a device that sits in my hand and I don't know that my brain would have thought of much more than "this is unusual" (it helps that I have no twitter followers). I've also been in relationships where something like this could happen and wouldn't want someone to broadcast it.
I think the future is going to be a hard lesson in "give everyone the benefit of the doubt".
Heidegger (and fellow philosophers) predicted this decades ago (and it has been taking place for decades). His "The Question Concerning Technology" (Die Frage nach der Technik) foresees how technology increasingly demands our attention and changes us through what it enables, when even mass television did not yet exist.
It works the same way any friendship works with the same sex for heterosexual men. I have positively no desire to sleep with my closest male friends, but they are my friends because we challenge each other, support each other or just otherwise get along and have similar interests (preach to the choir to each other).
Of my female friends, my emotional/sexual desire ranges. I opt for transparency. I don't do booty calls or casual sex because it doesn't work for me. But I have admitted my feelings to several of my female friends (both as "I'm not interested in anything other than a platonic relationship" to get it off the table and the opposite). In one case I dated a close friend for a short stint, and in almost all of the others my feelings were not reciprocated (I think American women where I live anyway don't see long term friends as sexual objects as I have no problems attracting good looking women that are otherwise strangers -- topic for another reply). In all cases, sharing my emotional/sexual feelings strengthened the friendship after a short period of awkwardness. It simply takes the issue off the table.