Notices by Stuart :progress_pride: (slowe@mastodon.me.uk), page 2

Not being on Facebook, WhatsApp, Nextdoor etc seems to mean that I miss out on most of the drama on my street. Which is good.

In early 2020 I was drafting a blog post about projects to crowd-source information about street trees. I was annoyed that so many projects (including ones with "open" in their names) created closed silos of data from the free contributions of volunteers. I was trying to come up with a simple tool to make it easy for normal people to update trees in OpenStreetMap instead. Then the pandemic happened. Anyway, more than three years on, I've finally written it up https://open-innovations.org/blog/2023-05-23-where-are-all-the-trees

Train stations in the UK each have 3 letter codes. For instance Kings Cross is KGX and Leeds is LDS. What's the best journey you can do in 3 letter codes?

HIP ➡️ HOP (Highams Park to Hope, Derbyshire)
SKI ➡️ SEA (Skipton to Seaham)
BUY ➡️ HAT (Burley Park to Hatfield)
EGG ➡️ HEN (Eggesford to Hendon)
TIP ➡️ TOP (Tipton to Topsham)
TOO ➡️ HOT (Tooting to Henley-on-Thames)
TAT ➡️ TOO (Tattenham Corner to Tooting)

@thomasfuchs Yes, the water spout image is the latest to get criticism. APOD has been edited by two individuals (mostly in their spare time) continuously since 1995 and people get very critical about what they think should be "allowed". Sometimes (across 20+ years) the editors have chosen to have a wider definition. Sometimes, due to their lives, they show repeats which then get criticised as personal affronts to people whose submissions haven't been included yet. Some hate videos being included

@thomasfuchs Out of interest, what is your particular complaint about "bad quality"? I can think of several interpretations and am interested in what your take on that is.

It has been endlessly fascinating over the years to see the people who complain when APOD includes a picture (or video) that doesn't fit their idea of what APOD should be. These complaints are often framed as if this is a slipping of standards or a personal affront to them or someone they know. They often ignore the long history (from 1995) of showing things that weren't strictly "astronomy" e.g. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap950806.html was a rocket launch.

Just last week some friends told me that people "get more conservative with age" (in the UK) as if that is just inevitable. But the link with age is starting to go https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323. There is a correlation with home ownership https://twitter.com/davidottewell/status/1633108779137998848 but the FT's John Burn-Murdoch points out that the link, for Millennials, is going even amongst home owners: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608759025084297216

It did teach me that a bunch of libertarian men are all in favour of lower regulation until you use that lack of regulation to behave cooperatively to help each other.

I still don't agree that we were a cartel as there was no secrecy, deceit, or defrauding going on. We were very open about forgiving rent and doing better deals within the coop than the 'official' prices outside the coop. Anyway it was funny to see libertarian men be unhappy about something happening due to very limited market regulation (no rules saying you couldn't discount rent or undercut the guide prices).

Although Monopoly is so often presented/framed as an individualistic game of capitalist dominance, it doesn't actually have to be played like that. The system might strongly encourage that but the players can behave differently. A better way is possible.

A few years ago I shared this story on Twitter and then had angry libertarian men complain that I'd cheated and had actually made a cartel, not a cooperative. They weren't happy that I pointed out that no rules had been broken. In fact it was the lack of market regulation in Monopoly that allowed us to do what we did. Plus we did it fully openly and the fourth player was able to join our coop if he'd wanted.

Within a remarkably short space of time the monopolist had lost his dominance and the rest of us had flourished. He went bankrupt and the rest of us agreed to end the game as joint victors. I felt as though we perhaps played it more to the spirit of the original game that Monopoly had been derived from and found a non-monopolist solution.

I haven't played Monopoly for many years now. The last game was with three housemates at university. One housemate was winning and really enjoying his triumph over the rest of us. So I suggested to my other two housemates that we form a cooperative. We would let each other off rents on our properties. The standards rents would apply to anyone not in the coop. And you could leave the coop if you wanted. None of this is forbidden in the rules of Monopoly because it has little market regulation.