IM is fine for quick, ephemeral communications ("I just arrived at the restaurant") or automated processes ("Your authentication code for $BANK is 9975"), but for meaningful, thoughtful communication between human beings, email works better for me. The main advantages:
- I use my own domain, so I'm not tied to any single provider
- I can keep a copy of everything (I still have some emails from 30 years ago)
There's also OPVS, which supposedly can be self-hosted (I don't know how good their product is; I'm content with 3G-only 2012 Leaf being permanently offline).
I was trying to explain to my grandmother (born in 1923) what the Internet was. So I pulled up Ask Jeeves and typed in, "What's the weather in [grandmother's hometown, population 4000]. And the precise current forecast came up.
That was in 1997.
I've read a number of articles on this topic, but there's one issue I've never seen addressed: With the large number of cables now in place, often with multiple cables running along similar paths, how great is the risk that in the course of raising up one end of a broken cable, you accidentally snag some other cable that was laid across the first cable after it was laid?
Or is the ocean just so vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big that hardly any cables cross over each other?
The podcast "Revisionist History" by Malcom Gladwell did a great episode on the US News and World Report college ranking list, and the (often perverse) incentives it's created.
The focus on a small set of core vocabulary is one of the main principles of the Pimsleur method, along with a strict spaced repetition format. When I travel to a new country I always spend about 15-20 hours beforehand doing the 30-minute Pimsleur lessons, just to pick up basic survival vocabulary. I've always been satisfied with the results.
I only upvote submissions that I read, which means I don't upvote paywalled articles.
I will upvote comments that are insightful, thought-provoking and well-reasoned, even if I disagree with them.
I will downvote comments that are incoherent, off-topic and immature, even if I agree with them.
meet.hn/city/34.0028569,-84.1441046/Duluth
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