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https://www.curbed.com/2018/7/11/17536876/great-room-house-size-design-square-footage


If I could do so conveniently I would link the study on home area utilization but it's referenced in this article. Really Food For Thought for anyone who's considering purchasing a home.

Some of this stuff is cultural. There was a particular style of house that seems more popular in Hispanic neighborhoods and it in consists of a generous eat-in kitchen that adjoins the family room so it makes for one large room when you need it.

Part of that could be economics because it's a luxurious pointed out in the article to have room so you're not going to use but I think a lot of it is simply cultural. Family and friends are welcome in the kitchen. Which is always a guy in my view a good way to entertain. I always enjoy puttering in the kitchen at a host's gathering.
 
Bacigalupo has a keyboard?!?? :confused:

Today's read is about reading and it's role in the quality of learning and the desire to learn which are inter-related:

https://www.designluck.com/becoming-educated/

This is about Isaac Asimov and how he became such a vast storehouse of knowledge, but it applies to a lot of great thinkers some of the most prolific geniuses were known to be voracious readers. I have often wondered whether being a genius makes reading easy and fun or whether reading a lot makes one a genius. I was listening to an NPR interview about seven or eight years ago with an author who wrote a book on that very subject unfortunately I tuned in mid- interview so I have no idea who the author is or what the book was but I've always kind of wanted to bump into it.

In the link article it points out that fiction is a great source of knowledge because it is such a good delivery vehicle to the mind. When you're engaged you learn.
 


The New York Times??

Don't believe a single word out of them.



Contrary To The NY Times The D[ominican] R[epublic] Has Lots of Clean Beautiful Beaches
by Kip Hansen






"Palko Karasz, writing in the New York Times, with a degree of insensitivity bordering on blatant intentional libel, reports: “Come for the beaches, say tourism ads for the Dominican Republic. But it has some beaches you might want to skip right now. The Caribbean nation is known for sapphire seas and ivory beaches, but it is grappling with waves of garbage washing up on its shores, a vivid reminder of the presence of thousands of tons of plastic in the world’s oceans.”

The NY Times article is “Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic”, published yesterday in the Times’ AMERICAS section. There are photos of a massive shore clean-up, with government employees raking up huge piles of floating plastic trash mixed with seaweed. Most of the article is based on a rabidly biased blog post from an anti-plastics activist group Parley for the Oceans.

It appears, at a quick glance, that Karasz has allowed himself to be gamed into the story by Parley for the Oceans. Karasz is “a digital editor for The New York Times, based in the London newsroom. He is part of a digital team that covers live news, including recent terrorist attacks and elections across Europe.” Environmental news is not his beat…the Caribbean is not his beat….oceanic plastic is not his beat..."



more...

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It is infuriating to see what is obviously bullshit which has had no fact-checking whatsoever presented by the self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" that is, in fact, the result of a blatant agenda including dissemination of what is clearly propaganda.

Anybody who's actually been there knows the N.Y. Times article is a steaming pile of DELIBERATE and INTENTIONAL invention.



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TFW you're all excited to see that something new has posted to 'good reads' only to find out it is just some a-hole posting a picture.

Yah, thanks for nothing.
 
The elegant art of not giving a shit

During a very famous moment, Krishnamurti asked the audience if they wanted to know his secret. The lecture hall went silent, and everyone leaned forward.

“You see,” he said, “I don’t give a shit.”

I’m paraphrasing. By most accounts he said “You see, I don’t mind what happens,” but he could have easily said either, and not giving a shit is a concept more people can identify with. I apologize for the vulgarity of the phrase — I will use it a lot in this article — but nothing else captures this piece of wisdom quite as well.

When you tell people to “not mind what happens,” they’ll probably look at you funny unless they’re the type of person who would be in the audience at a Krishnamurti lecture. But everyone understands that there are times in life when the best way to respond to an unpleasant event is to not give a shit.

Giving a shit really just amounts to thinking about what happened. If someone was rude to you on the phone, and you think a lot about it, you are giving a shit. If you hang up and shrug and then go for a bike ride, then you are successfully not giving a shit.

Giving a shit does not necessarily mean you’re doing anything useful, but it makes it seem like you are. It feels like there’s some kind of justice that you’re getting closer to with every moment you give a shit. But that’s not true, because giving a shit, by itself, is only thinking — and thinking has little use aside from figuring out what to do.

This illuminates one of our most stubborn, silly beliefs about human thinking: that most of it is worthwhile, that it’s actually getting you somewhere. Most thoughts just fill up your head and distance you from the life that’s still unfolding in front of you. They’re not leading to any important decisions or insights, they’re just taking over your present moment, and possibly shortening your life on the other end too.

We often believe that our thoughts are accomplishing something just because they’re emotionally charged, or because they’re “about” something we consider important, like fairness, respect, or the state of society.

No. They are useful only insofar as they get you to move your body and do something useful.

This isn’t to say that action is always necessary when it comes to responding to life’s countless little annoyances, rudenesses, and unfairnesses. In fact, usually it isn’t. Often there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you’re willing to do. That’s fine. In those cases, which I think represent the vast majority of cases, you’re better off not giving a shit.

Not giving a shit sounds like apathy, but it’s not. It’s simply a refusal to waste your energy and time on thoughts you’re not going to act on. So when you do give a shit, make sure that the point of this shit-giving is to figure out what you’re actually going to do in response to what happened, and then move on to the action part.

Read more: https://www.raptitude.com/2014/07/not-giving-a-shit/


TFW you've found a real good read.

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A very long but eye-opening article:
The Case Against Google



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
by Charles Duhigg

...Google has succeeded where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide. It processes trillions of queries each year, which works out to at least 5.5 billion a day, 63,000 a second. So odds are good that sometime in the last week, or last hour, or last 10 minutes, you’ve used Google to answer a nagging question or to look up a minor fact, and barely paused to consider how near-magical it is that almost any bit of knowledge can be delivered to you faster than you can type the request. If you’re old enough to remember the internet before 1998, when Google was founded, you’ll recall what it was like when searching online involved AltaVista or Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or porn. (Pity the early web enthusiasts who innocently asked Jeeves about “amateurs” or “steel.”)...

In other words, it’s very likely you love Google, or are at least fond of Google, or hardly think about Google, the same way you hardly think about water systems or traffic lights or any of the other things you rely on every day. Therefore you might have been surprised when headlines began appearing last year suggesting that Google and its fellow tech giants were threatening everything from our economy to democracy itself.


(much) more...


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The Fatal Lure of Democratic Socialism
by Willis Eschenbach


I see that we now have socialists coming out of the political woodwork. This is quite strange to me because there has never been a successful socialist state. Socialism has been tried many, many times—in the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the People’s Republic of Albania, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, the People’s Republic of Angola, Belarus, the Peoples Republic of Benin, East Germany, Hungary, Venezuela, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Cuba, Romania, Myanmar, Cuba, South Yemen, the Peoples Republic of Bulgaria, Laos and Yugoslavia.

And in each and every one of these countries, socialism has not just failed—it has cratered with a huge toll in human suffering, economic deprivation, and death. Every time. No exceptions.

However, the socialist folks always have a ready-made excuse for the failure of socialism in all of these countries … in humorous form, the excuse goes like this:

"Q: What’s the difference between Nazism and Socialism?

A: Nobody ever tried to excuse Nazism’s failures by saying “But it wasn’t TRUE Nazism” …"​

Here’s the most prominent American Socialist these days, engaging in a calm, measured, collegiate, reasonable debate on the merits of TRUE socialism:



Bernie Sanders is a millionaire “socialist” who just accidentally happens to own three houses, all of them probably nicer than yours. I guess George Orwell was right when he wrote that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others … but I digress...

more...

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Good Old Days

by Terry Teachout


Mencken’s Days books are no longer widely read, but those who know his work more than casually are in universal agreement that they rank among his greatest literary achievements...

...the point of The Days Trilogy: Expanded Edition is, it should be needless to say, the books themselves. If you already know them, they’re as good as you remember, and if you don’t, you’re in for the most resplendently satisfying of treats. Mencken never wrote anything better, or more likely to last.

Why, then, are the Days books largely unknown save to specialists? One obvious reason is that Mencken, being the most politically incorrect of writers, is not taught in the academy, meaning that you have to find out about him on your own...

...Contrary to popular belief, Mencken was not a conservative, or even a full-blooded libertarian: He fits no known ideological pigeonhole. But in one respect he was perfectly described by Michael Oakeshott, who probably never read a word of his but nonetheless hit the bull’s-eye when he observed that conservatives have “a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.” H. L. Mencken was among the most furious of complainers when it came to matters cultural and political, but in his daily life he had an enviable capacity for enjoying things as they are. The fancy word for this capacity is “gusto,” and Mencken had it in spades: He liked a good chat, a good meal, a good glass of beer, and a good night’s sleep, and he understood that in such simple pleasures lies much, perhaps most of the point of life. It is that gusto which irradiates the Days books, and anyone who can read them without feeling a reciprocal echo of his joie de vivre is a blue-nosed prig...


more...

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Wow. Just wow.


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Yeah baby! (Austin Powers voice)

Bruch...spent the past few years studying how people make decisions and pursue partners on online-dating sites, using exclusive data from the dating sites themselves.

- In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.

-Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor’s degrees; men with bachelor’s degrees beat high-school graduates.

hey ladies, that's totally me :D

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/...ing-out-of-your-league/567083/?utm_source=twb
 
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