From the book author's bio: "PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC"

What's going on with Dreamhost lately? Is it falling apart?

I havent seen anyone talk about it for the last 10-15 yrs. I would have guessed it fell apart already

They abandoned all support for email lists a couple of months back. Will likely move after 20+ years on DH.

Chat support works well. Email is nonexistent.

I don't mean "support for using mailing lists". I meant "they no longer provide the services (i.e. mailman) to run mailing lists"

i wouldn't be so sure. I know I move in privacy and "anti big tech" circles, but I (and a lot of people I know) am moving a lot of my personal/recreational internet time to rss feeds of personal websites, mailing lists, and Mastodon. And there's a fair bit of discussion and small but growing use of private and very small group federated Mastodon hosts.

Having said that, very little of that is being done by the sort of people who'd host it on a service like Dreamhost.

Mailing lists are inherently dangerous as you can be marked as a spammer.

Everyone (and I mean everyone) is a spammer by default these days, so this is no problem in practice.

Topicbox.com, from the team behind Fastmail

I mean, clearly the person you’re replying to does

No, they’re still doing well.

Support is primarily via chat these days.

Pricing wise they don’t beat Herzner anymore but are somewhat competitive with Digital Ocean.

I am gradually moving everyone to my own self hosting mostly for supportability reasons. We want to react in seconds, not hours, when a customer has an issue.

I've been using Contabo, and so far, the service has been quite stable and professional. Updates are handled automatically, and I haven't encountered any major issues DigitalOcean seems a bit slower and more expensive in comparison, especially when Contabo offers a VPS with 4 CPU and 8 GB of RAM for just 4.50 euro/month.

I'm still at DH (have been for 20 years), but taking a peek at Hetzner... seems compelling at 30% cheaper than I pay now.

Just be warned Hetzner will delete your account at the slightest sign of controversy. It's fine for Minecraft but I wouldn't want to host a political website there.

Working pretty well for me.

Same. Into my second decade with them. Great value, no real complaints.

You write well, why not challenge yourself to write a book?

Assuming you didn't use AI for more than spelling

How did these animals survive as a species for millions of years with this flip-over bug in their genes? Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?

> How did these animals survive as a species for millions of years with this flip-over bug in their genes?

Whether or not they can right themselves depends upon the terrain. Falling over can be a fatal experience for humans too.

> Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?

Evolution is all about trade-offs. Being big makes it hard to right yourself, but it also makes you much harder to flip. It probably also probably makes you much hotter to potential mates.

The web is a wonderful place: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/giant-tortoise-galapag...

You're assuming natural selection selects for not flipping over, when in reality, it selects for the winner of the shell flipping contest as presumably without intervention, the flipped tortoise does not breed, while the winning tortoise does (or at least still has the opportunity to)

They reproduce before it happens and the brood sizes are too numerous to select against that

Only someone who has never been to an actual museum can call this thing a museum, let alone the "last one."

At the same time, the US president is interfering in the elections in Israel.

Low EV adoption will lead to much more death and suffering due to climate change. So, sure, it's not the ideal way to achieve this result, but it's better than the alternative.

I wouldn't be so optimistic. At the current trend, we might be just walking corpses. Like newborn Japanese children from Nagasaki on the 2nd August 1945 (4 days before its sudden democratisation or vaporisation by the American democrazy). We are just seeing the apocalypse in slow motion.

According to some of the most optimistic doomsayers of the Interwebs, the warming levels we are enjoying as of today are due to the CO2 levels of 30 years ago.

I'm driving along Route 66 now, and $80 is about the average for a decent motel room.

Are "3,000 new jobs" enough to make a dent though?

it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.

The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.

The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?

Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.

One would think the same thing about having some of the biggest chemical manufacturing and refining industries around and yet the people of Louisiana are some of the poorest in the US.

Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.

My friend. If you know anything about Louisiana and their current government is that the people are there to be exploited. This is not going to help the people of the area at all.

yeah but that site is huge, that's a multi-decade construction project.

>It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over.

The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.

The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.

The whole "temporary jobs" line is completely irrelevant nonsense. Sure, it's correct, but who cares? The alternative is zero. It's not like there is only a limited amount of undeveloped land and a bunch of people bidding for it. And of course those jobs don't stick around after construction is over. They're construction workers. They move on to the the next construction job.

aren't literally all construction jobs temporary? once something is finished you usually stop construction.

Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:

>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.

https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab

That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.

> many of whom will be from Grimes

That required a double take

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, especially if you're into philosophical thinking. The way he blends it with a compelling narrative is masterful.