I also had a close family member who committed suicide shortly after going on Prozac -- this also happened nearly 30 years ago. His young son later went on Prozac himself (several months after his fathers suicide) and immediately started demonstrating bizarre disinhibited anti-social behavior (e.g., damaging property, stealing from friends, etc). He was immediately yanked off Prozac when he started articulating his own thoughts of suicide. The bizarre anti-social behavior improved after discontinuing Prozac.
For some people, Prozac is a very dangerous drug. It is fully deserving of its FDA black label warning (which it didn't have 30 years ago).
That street view was filmed taken two months ago, when it was still warm and nice out, so tent activity would've been at its peak.
I wish I had seen your post earlier because I literally walked that stretch of road earlier this evening -- a couple friends of mine from out of town are going to the Patti Smith show at the Paramount tonight and we had drinks nearby. No tents in sight though we did encounter someone walking around with a blanket wrapped around their head. But still, one probable homeless drug addict is hardly "overrun".
It's really not as you describe... I agree things were getting worse in ~2019 and then became way worse during the pandemic, but it's much different now.
In the interest of saving myself an hour of time uploading a video, I’ll attest that yes—that street view is as “average day on Pike” as it gets.
To be clear, there are homeless who walk around the area… and Capitol Hill isn’t exactly the nicest area these days. 3rd and Pike isn’t nice. But Seattle in 2025 isn’t real-life World War Z.
It sounds like your last visit was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless encampment conditions in downtown Seattle and throughout the city have much improved since then. Today, visible homelessness is effectively the same as it was back in ~2005.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I've lived in the area for nearly 20 years and I agree that his description is far exaggerated. It was true in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic (when any eviction or forcible displacement of people was prohibited), but not since then. Today, the visibility of homeless encampments in Seattle is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago.
> The homeless encampment problem in Seattle today is roughly now back at the same level of problem we had 20 years ago.
See, this is wild to me. Seattle has a long-time notorious problem with Tent Cities and even now it's just completely normal. I remember The Jungle under I-5 at Beacon Hill was a big problem. I'm sure it still is.
"The Jungle" isn't at all the same now, and is mostly cleared out from its heyday in ca 2018.
The larger problem with "The Jungle" is that nobody can agree on what it means, and where it is. I used to live on Beacon Hill, and the way journalists used the phrase was all over the place. Incidents anywhere from the I-90/I-5 interchange to the camps under I-5 all the way south to Georgetown, to the camps up in the woods in the East Duwamish greenbelt were all called "The Jungle".
You are citing the US News "best states" ranking. In that ranking, California is ranked #37 overall and Arkansas is ranked #47 overall. Even your own hand picked data source supports the OP...
37th/50 isn't good. But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely). This same ranking puts states like South Dakota and Indiana ahead, which I'm sure many would object to all the same.
This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in Arkansas or anything, but I think we as a community can do better than devolve into it over and over, unless the topic at hand was the problems of a state.
I'm not saying that 37 out of 50 is good. I'm saying that 47 out of 50 is bad. Your data source doesn't refute the OPs argument that Arkansas is not a great place to live -- it actually supports the OP.
"But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely)."
Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better.
1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro
2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in many cases are growing crops that are basically exporting our scarce water overseas. Then they want to complain about a 'government-created dust bowl' when it's their own out of control water usage basically creating and exacerbating the situation. Oh and the desire to live in a floodplain, thus draining the largest lake in the state (if not landlocked lake in the country) and worsening drought conditions for the area for the past near-century.
3. OTHER STATES keep shipping their homeless here, thus drastically increasing our poverty numbers, artificially, and straining resources we don't really have thanks to ill-advised programs that do nothing to actually address anything.
4. Thanks to climate change, it's getting fucking HOT. Like, the heat you would normally only experience in the desert, is now a regular occurrence here in the valleys of SoCal. The deserts are actually cooler on occasion.
5. People can't drive and the cops do nothing even when it happens right in front of them. Oh, speaking of police, did you know many of them are in inter-department gangs? Yea, we just had to outlaw that.
6. Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
7. Thanks to new law, fast food workers have a minimum wage over the state minimum wage. So many jobs which require high skill, like what I do in LASERs and LED lighting, get paid less than them (I'm lucky, where I work knows my worth) and it ends up being demoralizing. I'm betting it caused a small hit across a few sectors as people said "I'll pay the $30 to get a license that lets me make $20 an hour" meanwhile starting techs in my sector get $16, or $17 on a night shift differential.
Happy yet? I can keep going. Rabbit hole's deep af.
Thanks, I think. But no, I didn't mean to pick on California as a bad state, I thought for some reason most people thought it was a nice state. I do, at least, despite its warts.
All I meant to say is that we can find many reasons every state is bad. But we shouldn't post them every time it's mentioned.
If Meta declared they were opening a huge new office in the bay, we'd get interesting discussion. If they announced they're opening it in Little Rock, we get little more than how awful AR is.
> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.
"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.
It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.
Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.
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Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).
The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.
""Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today."
From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.
"Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population,"
The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist. I talk to the population there regularly before I go out to the Chambless skarn to dig. ditto the mining community that's there for the quarry at Kelbaker road (I own the uranium mine nearby.)
"The road to Dish Hill"
Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover. You have to come from Amboy's power line backroads.
Great, but it's not contiguous. This stretch is about 70 miles long and merges back into I-40 at either end, and is the part of it we are talking about. What I said is accurate.
> The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist.
The farm in the middle of the desert that is a front for a decades-long attempt to loot and export the aquifer underneath it, regardless of the permanent damage it will cause, that one? That explicitly shouldn't exist.
It's also about 9 trailers and a house or two. And still has road access, as I noted and you appear to agree.
> Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover.
Meaning the actual paved road to get to the area, or the unmaintained (unofficial?) path from the road, under the tracks, to the hill itself?
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But this is getting into the debate weeds. I'll be very generous and call the population along this stretch of road about 50 people.
There's close to 100 timber bridges in need of replacement, 70 miles of degrading asphalt, and of course - perpetual maintenance costs for both over the long term. It serves basically zero transportation function today.
I'm not a small government type, but the many, many millions of dollars it would cost to actually repair this road (not to mention continue to maintain it), do not seem remotely justified by it's utility.
The very tiny populations, tiny amount of industry, and very limited north-south function (Amboy Rd) here can be served by keeping the ~10mi Amboy-Chambless stretch and abandoning the rest of it/downgrading it to a 4WD track across the desert just like the dozens of other roads. Maintained/paved access via I-40 from Kelbaker Rd only.
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tl;dr - This is not, in my view, a case of government being unable to maintain infrastructure. This is a case where a large portion of the population would not feel that putting money into keeping this road in existence as a paved/2WD road along it's full length, is a worthwhile endeavor. You clearly have a vested interest in it.
This is a really interesting phenomenon that I've experienced before myself but I hadn't fully understood or appreciated as clearly as the author has.
At my company we put a big emphasis on code reviews. We encourage devs to pull request code fairly regularly to keep PRs relatively small (when possible) -- before so much code has been written that it's not really possible to change course without blowing up deadlines. We encourage our junior devs (who might not be capable of identifying bugs or proposing fixes on code written by a senior) to ask questions in their code reviews -- to verify assumptions, to request an explanation of how something works, confirm that a particular edge case has already been considered, etc. It can be hard to get a junior dev comfortable with doing this (questioning a senior dev), but even if the junior isn't identifying bugs it will often lead the senior to better understand their own code and the architectural concepts that underpin their own coding decisions. Like the author points out, this only happens because the senior dev endeavors to explain their work to the junior dev (Protege effect). Also, a good many times it leads the senior dev to re-consider how they wrote something and they might add a revision to address a possible edge case not previously considered. I hadn't thought of it this way before, but this is the Socratic method that the author talks about.
We also put a big emphasis on in-code comment writing -- largely following the commenting principles laid out by John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design". These comments are of course for long-term maintenance purposes, but they also benefit team learning. Class, method and variable naming are obviously important too. Our internal code reviewing mantra is that 'I want to be able to read your code like a story book -- when I get to the end, I at least want to be able to understand what happened'. Not always possible, but a good goal. Writing comments and choosing class/method/variable names in pursuit of that goal massively contributes to the learning of the team. During our code reviews, one of the most common requests by reviewers is for the author to add a comment explaining something that was very difficult (or impossible) for the reviewer to grasp on a first read.
This approach has worked very well for us. Everyone learns and our product quality improves.
You have to be OK getting rid of productive assholes that mess up this culture. The hint of a senior not being open to criticism will instantly halt any ability for a team to have a safe, open dialog.
Equally true when they're good and bad, unfortunately.
In the 18 years since I graduated (I feel old), I have seen some people easily carry entire projects while demotivating everyone around them… and also colossal idiots who were just as confident and unwilling to listen.
I really hope I never end up unable to listen to critics.
We've found good result hiring candidates who've experienced some form of ego-death. It's a difficult signal to separate from the noise of the talent pipeline, but until people start filling their resumes with meditation buzzwords, it will suffice.
How do you select for this? I am significantly less cocky than in my youth, simply because I have accumulated a long list of personal failures (ie teaching moments). Failings which I would not want to discuss with a potential employer.
Yeah, very true, when we're hiring we'll sometimes skip over the most talented candidate and pick a candidate who we feel would be the better communicator, easier to work with and fit in with the team. Easier said than done, but we at least try to hire for that.
This thing with small PRs bothers me somehow.
Where does design happen? Do we just make endless tactical changes?
For juniors this is even worse, they get to wait until PR time to validate their design. With trunk based development this means continually commiting unreachable code with back and forth with more senior staff via PRs, instead of sitting down for an in depth discussion where they'd actually learn how to do this job.
This isn't really aimed at the parent poster, just an observation. I've been working since 2006, GitHub brought in PRs and I think we lost something over night: code reviews where you get to sit with more senior staff and discuss your code.
I've been working through PRs since around 2011 and I don't think I've ever seen a place where PRs were intentionally used to handle design issues. Occasionally design problems will get brought up in PR, but that's always been considered a failure of earlier planning when it happens.
Depending on the company, the design discussion you're talking about has happened:
1. In verbal discussions with other devs before fingers ever touch keyboards
2. In long-form writing (Text docs, then Google docs, then later Notion)
3. In per-project slack channels
4. Out loud, on a whiteboard.
Right now it's very much #4 because my company is 2 devs and a founder. But even here, I wouldn't expect to get anything non-trivial into pull request before figuring out the overall structure with the other dev verbally or in writing.
When possible, yeah. I imagine some sort of golden rule: "make PRs for others to review that you would like to review yourself." There's plenty of room for exceptions there - my coworker is currently reviewing a 1300-line PR after my apologies for it :)
But yes, we generally break things down into the smallest meaningful chunk possible to deliver. If that chunk is too small to understand the larger work that it's part of (as is usually the case for non-trivial work), we can discuss the larger work in another forum (ad-hoc verbally, via design doc, via meeting, etc).
At my first job a few years back I sat down with a senior dev at least once a week (informal meeting) to discuss my tasks and the code bases we were responsible for in general. It was incredibly helpful. I could also request feedback at any time. At the end of it, the final PR might be large, but it had mostly been discussed and reviewed by then, so doing a final review was more of a formality, dotting the i's and crossing the t's to ensure the criteria had been properly fulfilled.
In addition, writing code that is accessible to juniors (which should apply to a large majority of a code base) increases the velocity of everyone on the team. Readability, modularity, and consistency create standards and examples for a junior to work by, which is a great way to learn and lower the risk of bugs and surprises.
Yup. This is why I favour simple architectures like MVC over complex ones like VIPER.
While there may be exceptions, I default to: if an app is so messy as to consider a more complex architecture, it probably has so much going on as to be difficult for the end user to use it.
Truth is if you are doing the kind of work that fits into code reviews, small PRs and neat deadlines, does any of it matter? You're describing a tech enabled agency, not a startup. Sure customers have alternatives, but in the same sense that we have choices when booking airline tickets: you are describing a development process for a product that is fundamentally fungible, so the main differentiator among producers is costs, not management strategy.
Why on earth would a startup's code not be reviewable?
If I'm doing a big chunk of work, I still do it in small PRs. That first PR (or a design doc) might outline a strategy for the ones that follow, but still try to have small PRs. Or, worst case, I do a big chunk of work and break it out into small logical chunks for review.
> because beyond simple single-purpose applications with flexible uptime requirements, that’s not a realistic option.
I frequently hear this point expressed in cloud vs colo debates. The notion that you can't achieve high availability with simple colo deploys is just nonsense.
Two colo deploys in two geographically distinct datacenters, two active physical servers with identical builds (RAIDed drives, dual NICs, A+B power) in both datacenters, a third server racked up just sitting as a cold spare, pick your favorite container orchestration scheme, rig up your database replication, script the database failover activation process, add HAProxy (or use whatever built-in scheme your orchestration system offers), sprinkle in a cloud service for DNS load balancing/failover (Cloudflare or AWS Route 53), automate and store backups off-site and you're done.
Yes it's a lot of work, but so is configuring a similar level of redundancy and high availability in AWS. I've done it both ways and I prefer the bare metal colo approach. With colo you get vastly more bang for your buck and when things go wrong, you have a greater ability to get hands on, understand exactly what's going on and fix it immediately.
I doubt you’ll find anyone who disagrees that colo is much cheaper and that it’s possible to have failover with little to no downtime. Same with higher performance on bare metal vs a public cloud. Or at least I’ve never thought differently.
The difference is setting up all of that and maintaining it/debugging when something goes wrong is not a small task IMHO.
For some companies with that experience in-house I can understand doing it all yourself. As a solo founder and an employee of a small company we don’t have the bandwidth to do all of that without hiring 1+ more people which are more expensive than the cloud costs.
If we were drive-speed-constrained and getting that speed just wasn’t possible then maybe the math would shift further in favor of colo but we aren’t. Also upgrading the hardware our servers run on is fairly straightforward vs replacing a server on a rack or dealing with failing/older hardware.
Yep. Setting maths and motors aside... it's why helicopters have service ceilings and why no one has built a helicopter that can fly away into the stratosphere.
Impetus is certainly more artistic and thought-provoking, but is there anything that makes Impetus a greater technical achievement than Street Food? From my (very) non-expert perspective, Street Food seems much more technically impressive.
> Where people come up with that kind of cash is beyond me, but they're coming up with it one way or another.
A "cash buyer" just means that the buyer didn't open a new mortgage to close the sale. Cash buyers often bring in cash from other interest-accruing loans -- such as HELOCs or portfolio loans. Foreigners or irregular income earners are a couple examples of people who might not qualify for a conventional mortgage and would need to tap into alternative loans to buy a house and thereby become a "cash buyer". Cash offers are also considered more competitive (they close faster), so someone might make a cash offer (via other loans) just to make their offer have a higher chance of succeeding.
For some people, Prozac is a very dangerous drug. It is fully deserving of its FDA black label warning (which it didn't have 30 years ago).