I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
In your country,
- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?
- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-m...
To our questions from Germany:
- by Post, but I can imagine this changing as payment via phone/watch/... is spreading and I can imagine banks willing to reduce cost, making physical cards an paid extra.
- on my contract via e-mail and the energy company's website. There are paper based contracts available, though.
- In Germany/Europe SEPA wire transfers work well for that and are being used for decades, even with online banking being wide spread in the 90ies. (Pre Internet via BTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext )
The electricity company has their own employees to deliver paper monthly statements to all their customers, they can attach other communications if needed.
My bank has a connection to the electricity company, and can look up in realtime what my open balance is, which you can view and pay in the banking app. You can also pay it in cash at various offices (e.g. Western Union) around the city.
You can also just give the electricity company permission to automatically take it out of your account every month (ppl don't trust the electricity company to get the amount correct, so folks don't usually do this. I do this for the water bill though).
(this is my experience living in Ecuador for 10 years, I'm from the Netherlands, most of this is weird to me :)
Contrast to where I live now (Spain) where I can still go to the bank to deposit/withdraw money, so the use case for the branch/building/office is kind of obvious.
But it should be noted, except the physical objects, those letters can be also replaced with other means of communication. Just calling people via phone is common, or nowadays sending an email will also do the job. In my country we have a working and reliable postal system, but companies are still replacing letters with digital communication as far as laws allow it. Payments are also running automatically, so the bills are more informative and for taxes.
The bank sends it through mail but they warn you that if it doesn't arrive within 2 weeks you should go in person to the bank to retrieve it. Depending on where you live there's a 50/50 chance that it never arrives through mail so you just wait 2 weeks and go to the bank.
> - how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
Email. Or the news channel for elderly people (if the increase is too big). If the increase is small that's a fact of life, everyone just expects it to increase a bit every 2 or 3 months.
> - how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
Website or bank app. There are physical places that take cash payments and do the online process for you, elderly people generally use those.
For bank cards you go to their branch and get a new one from a person who works there, or by interacting with a terminal which prints your name on a blank card and spits it out. Some banks deliver them to your home address by courier service and hand them over in person, and they're not "elite" or special by any means.
Utilities are paid through online/mobile banking, there are many alternatives and it takes maybe 10 seconds. Even my 70-something year old relatives use them. Some even older ones rely on help from others, or to go physical bank branches and pay there (which wastes a lot of time of everyone waiting in line to be serviced — I don't personally know anyone who does that, but have seen it a couple of times).
Price increases? Local news, or you can subscribe to receive them by email. Or just check in the online banking app when it's time to make another payment, it's all there.
As for price changes regarding utilities (or really, anything) we get an e-mail from the service provider or from the landlord (who then gets an e-mail from the service provider). We also pay for utilities via an online bank transfer or automated subscription to the service provider or to the landlord via a bank transfer (who then pays via an online bank transfer or has an automated subscription).
Elderly people set up automatic subscription services in their local bank branch or by calling the bank, I have not heard of a single elderly person using mail to pay for anything.
The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...
AFAIK modern Russian ones just say "Почта России", but the overall design is retained, including pre-labelled lines for various parts of address.
I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.
Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.
It only has to be lined up well enough to be read by a human, they don't reject them just because it's sloppy or not lined up correctly.
I've never seen it in any office or stationary shop in Europe. It's available online, at a premium.
If I format the page size, Libreoffice does offer "Letter" and "Legal". GIMP shows them as "US Letter" and "US Legal" but again they're not the default.
It wouldn't surprise me if most non-US users hadn't seen them at all, and certainly not that they don't realise the US uses a different size.
My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?"
"The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper"
"Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??"
I did not know how to respond to this question.
Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.
Only if there is an issue with the rollers or something and it can't feed the paper from the paper cassette. No one ever wants to read the manuals or do basic troubleshooting though. Hell newer ones have a menu on them that will walk you through each of the troubleshooting steps, but people would rather put a post-it on it saying it's broken.
Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year.
I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.
I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.
I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.
As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.
I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
Is return postage something that, normally, my local post office would help me with? E.G. do they have some method of marking or adding post to a package that would be accepted globally (or at least within the destination country)?
I think I've sent far more international letters and parcels than domestic. Christmas cards for elderly relatives in the country I was born in, and postcards when I travelled abroad.
Some obscure things I sold on eBay were mostly sent abroad.
> I was disappointed to find out that the UK’s Royal Mail discontinued international reply coupons in 2011. The only alternative that I could think of was to buy some US stamps.
I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm:
“Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship
With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online”
Germany has (https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/deutsche-pos...):
“You simply need to open the app, select the appropriate postage service, tick “Code for labelling” (Code zum Beschriften), and pay with PayPal. You will then immediately receive a code, consisting of the letters #PORTO and an eight-digit string, which you must write in pen in the top right-hand corner of the envelope or postcard. Then, just pop it in the post box, and you’re done! The code is valid for 14 days and can only be used for Germany-bound mail.”
That 14-day limit may not be a good idea for this use case.
I don't have any pens, paper or a printer in my house, so I'd probably go to my workplace if I needed to send a letter nowadays. I do occasionally send a parcel though, which involves printing off a shipping label, so the process isn't completely alien.
I did print a page at work recently, the second one since I started my job 5 years ago.
Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.
The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
[1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
Which changes as times change.
In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.
Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.
But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.
Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!
Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.
I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience
Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.
I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.
It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
Some adults were born in 2007
Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.
Why didn't you efile like a normal person? The only time you need to do it the hard way is if you are under 16 and filing for the first time.
Edit: In hindsight, I could have just waited until the start of 2025 to update my address in the HR system and gotten a single, normal W-2, but then I would be both violating the remote work rules (by not adding my new work location) and (probably) committing tax fraud.
That's crazy to me - tax returns for our micro-business and personal tax has been online since at least 2005.
0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed
1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.
2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.
3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up
4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home
5. Went home to get my USB drive
6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)
7. Went home to get my mask
8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label
9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape
10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape
11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package
12. Went to another USPS to drop the package
This sentence really captures the absurdity of this story.
Right?
You have a USPS drop box for tiny boxes in front of your house.
I can't afford a house ($2M+ where I live), so I don't have one of those mailboxes. My apartment complex doesn't have a visible USPS pickup anywhere that I know of.
If you meant those inverted U shaped things that look like they are from WW2 (maybe WW1?), I forgot about those, but somehow I never know how frequently they are checked ... there is no indicator about when they were last opened and I wonder whether the mailman might just forget about a couple of them in odd parts of town, which is why I always feel more "secure" dropping it at a USPS.
I was once walking down the street when I saw a presumably-GenZ person who thought they were a trash can and casually dumped trash in it so there's also that concern, if everyone is using them as trash cans now ...
Those crazy retail rates exist so businesses can get big discounts. The company I work with ships maybe half a dozen packages international with FedEx a year and they still give us like 60-70% off retail.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the US and some other countries decided to do things differently... As a European, I don't think I've ever seen something not A4 or A3/A4 in a professional context in my life, ever. Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so), and do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing? Or just happens to be something FSF only seem to be doing?
That's the missing link for Americans.
Yes, the default printing paper for US is US Letter. I prefer to use my computers with US English language, and macOS defaults to US Letter as print and page size when you use US English as the default language.
Moreover, I had a ream of US Letter paper in the past, given me by our neighbor (I live in a A4 country, so it's that "odd" size).
Letter size is 8-1/2 x 11 inches by US standards.
A4 is readily available in the US but not commonly used.
The main problem is that if you cut it in half, you get a really silly sizes (too narrow) instead of A5.
I found out that they do not automatically adapt to JIS sizes. My wife’s work once had a printer that somehow got configured to use JIS, I assume JB5. It then refused to print on US Letter, but as printers are wont to do, didn’t produce any useful error message, nor relay this information to the computer. It just wouldn’t print. I only discovered this (because if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?) by laboriously scrolling through every menu on the tiny LCD screen, and finding that the paper settings were incorrect.
You kid, but it turns out the assumption was correct in this case. I suppose the truth is that by working in tech, you are likely very methodical and rely on deduction, which are both essential in fixing printer issues.
I don’t know when or why this skill declined, but it’s upsetting.
We just bought new ones when needed.
Or you can get whatever you want - I wanted B4 paper to print a booklet (or B3 maybe) and I just bought a ream that was larger and had a print shop slice it down to B4. My US laser printer was fine printing onto B4.
8.5 x 11” is US Letter, or 215.9 x 279.4 mm. We also have US Legal, which as the name implies, is frequently used by legal professions. I have no idea why. It is 8.5 x 14”, or 215.9 x 355.6 mm. Finally, we have US Tabloid (I guess used for small newspapers?), which is 11 x 17”, or 279.4 x 431.8 mm.
And yes, our printers default to US Letter. The line from the movie Office Space: “PC Load Letter? WTF does that mean?” is the printer’s cryptic way of saying “Load Letter-sized paper into the Paper Cassette.”
EDIT: there are are apparently more US-specific sizes I was unaware of, which you can view and compare with others on this site: https://papersizes.io/us/
Much to my surprise, a random check of a US-based office supply company shows that they do have A4 in stock -- at a price about 40% higher than letter-sized.
This one surprised me quite a bit. I think most people have A4/letter-sized folders. Why does anyone think that papers slightly longer than those folders are a good idea?
Legal folders can be great to be able to print letter-sized things on, then you have an area at the bottom to write notes and stuff.
Hacker News users may be familiar with Julia Evans (http://jvns.ca) who creates technology zines that work in both A4 and Letter sizes, folded in half.
I am familiar with A4, A5 and such. But I think that fewer and fewer people are. It's just not something used every day.
As a side note, most of the big important house bills and statements I still insist on receiving via US mail for protection reasons. There is a risk if I only had them emailed to me that my wife would not have access. If I were to suddenly die, I don't want my wife with our kids to miss a critical bill. By having them show up at the house in physical form provides a bit of defense in depth here.
I can guess why the Philippines uses ANSI sizes. But Chile?
One particular “standard” that sticks out in my memory was “math paper”, which I recall as being unbleached, about 5” x 8”, and used pervasively in primary education (at least in New England) into the 1990’s.
My general point is just that I'm surprised so many people seem to notice and care about paper size in general. I've just never thought about this at all.
But, yes, for most people it doesn't really matter - you go to the store, you buy paper, you shove it into your printer, and it mostly just works. However, it's also not all that hard to run into situations where things break. E.g. most PDFs originating from US are rendered for Letter size paper, which means that printing them outside of US generally requires setting "fit size" rather than "original" to ensure that nothing gets clipped. Vice versa also happens, but because US is so culturally dominant, Americans rarely run into that particular issue.
Americans are just very obstinate about those things. It's like the Windows of metrology - backwards compatibility trumps everything else, even when you have utterly bonkers things like ounces vs fluid ounces.
Using French Revolutionary units doesn’t really matter in STEM, either: one can conduct science just as well in any units one wishes. One unit of measure is not more scientific than another. For example, degrees Kelvin and Rankine measure the same thing with different units. If anything, the Rankine degrees are more precise!
For T&E it really matters see NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and the need for heroics in the Gimli glider.
You need to keep to the same unit.
Anyway, the French system isn't what people mean by "metric" in this context, they mean the SI system of units, and so in practice it's not so much that it wouldn't matter which you choose as that you don't have any option except SI.
If you wanted an independent system of units you'd need to do a lot of expensive metrication, and in practice Americans are too cheap for that, so the US "customary" units are just aliases for so-and-so-much amount of some SI unit, they aren't actually independent at all.
The reason people focus on metric is that for everyday people that's the part which jumps out as more intuitive. All these nice powers of 10, very tidy.
It's not just obstinance, switching everything to metric in the US would likely cost billions (if not trillions) of dollars. And other countries that have made the switch have often ended up with weird Frankensystems of measurement, like the UK where they mix metric and imperial all the time (plus the weird UK-specific measurements they have like "stone", which is based on the pound).
Except they didn't actually, see my points about the UK (similar points apply to Canada).
What's clumsy about 30cm though? If you are working at scales where this level of precision is needed, you can just use cm throughout, and the beauty of metric is that even someone who has never had to do that before will know immediately how much it is because conversion to meters (or millimeters, or whatever the primary unit is in their usual applications) is so easy.
Similarly, I've heard similar sentiments expressed about lack of pound equivalent in metric. But in practice we just say "500 grams" etc (and for bonus points you get 400 grams, 300 grams etc).
Miles and yards are both used as units of distance, so conversion is obviously relevant. The only reason why "yards in a mile" doesn't come up all the time is because Americans work around it by subconsciously (?) avoiding any such cases where the conversion is non-trivial. E.g. a road sign in Europe might say "400 m", whereas in US a similar one will be "1/4 miles".
And "evolved from hundreds years of usage" generally means a lack of internal consistency, because most units originated a long time ago as a way to measure something very specific - in many cases, something completely irrelevant to most people using those units today. Nor did those units remain consistent through history - just look at how many definitions ounce has in US in different contexts, all of them historical! Or regular vs nautical vs survey mile. Even just cleaning up that mess would be a massive improvement.
This is where we disagree. It would be a small improvement at best. Most of what you're pointing out are the awkward corner cases that just don't come up or, like you said, we already have other solutions for. Outside of some specialties, pretty much no one needs to know how many cups are in a gallon or yards in a mile or what a nautical mile is. I don't know those things, and I somehow get by OK.
And sure, of course metric isn't necessary. You can also write all software in COBOL and PL/I. But over the long term, the convenience of having a self-consistent system based on a few simple principles rather than historical precedent adds up.
People get very worked up about it too. People got very worked up about a government proposal to allow people to put imperial units on food in larger type than metric (at the moment it has to be metric larger - or at least the same size).
Everything in engineering and science has been entirely metric since the 80s.
OTOH on road sings, US at least seems to be using miles alone consistently, so you end up with labels like "1 3/4 miles" every now and then, which I find to be difficult to parse quickly.
I tend to think in metres at that scale but a yard is near enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
One does have to wonder what it is about Anglo countries specifically that makes it so difficult for them, though. Well, Canada at least has the excuse of being next door to US, with the resulting economic effects. For UK I'm pretty sure it's just about not being like "the Continent" at this point.
Anything to do with STEM is metric.
It is no more confusing to Americans than the fact that Europeans use A4 is to Europeans. Why should it be? Just like you didn’t know standards other than A4 exist, Americans don’t think about the fact that standards other than 8.5x11 inches (I.e. letter) exist. All printers, binders, folders, hole punchers, etc. are made with letter size paper in mind, and most people unless they are involved in business with other countries have never encountered an A4 sheet of paper in their lives and probably have no idea other standards exist.
Well, A4 (and variants) are not Europe-specific formats, it's the formats most of the world except some few countries (including the US) use, so I'd say it's slightly more surprising than the other way around.
Even if every other country in the world used A4, the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border. And in reality, Canada and Mexico also use letter so the border thing doesn’t apply.
So why should letter confuse us just because other people use something else?
That's the part I initially quoted; "the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm"
The author isn't from North America, so they had forgotten the format was different, so they got confused when they assumed it would have been A4 like the rest of the world, but it wasn't.
> the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border
Or, as in the case of the author, they live outside of North American and send/receive letters to/from North America.
A0 is 1 square meter
An to An+1 means cutting the paper along the middle of the longer edge
Each An has the same aspect ratio
Those are pretty useful properties and precisely define the dimensions of A4.
Like a lot of mathematics it does matter in your daily life but you actually just don't think about it because of course this works - unless you're an American and so no it doesn't.
The A-series paper sizes mean everything scales very naturally. Poster? Pamphlet? It's just the same ratios again but bigger or smaller. There is a single design where this works, and that's why the A-series exists, you can't just pick anything, only this works.
A4 folded in half (size of an A5) fits in a C5 envelope.
An ISO standard that makes sense and isn't based on different professions like "letter" vs "legal" vs "folio" and other US sizes.
But also the reason that, for example, screens have 80 columns, (also related to punch cards), but that was about the width of a "letter" page at 10cpi.
You can derive letter paper with two pieces of information: 8½ and 11. Just having a laugh, of course — I do admire the A/B series, even if I wish that they were based on a square yard :-)
Good thing it wasn't a complaint then, just questions from someone who doesn't know how it works across the pond :) And it seems to be the story of someone outside of North America trying to interact with the North American standards, not some internal confusion between internal states or whatnot.
Yes, it is just our standard like A4 is yours. When you pull a paper out of the pack it is A4 when we pull it out it is ANSI A, commonly known a US Letter size. Instead of 8.27”x11.69”, we use 8.5”x11”. We also commonly use US Legal size, which is 8.5”x14”. Slightly longer and can fit in the same envelope.
> do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing?
Yes. However all of our printers can do all sizes since our paper is slightly larger, while an A4 specific printer couldn’t print a US letter.
Margins on left/right might be skinnier, but length wise US letter fits.
Wow -- I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month...
Visa's debit card limit on Denmark seems to be 100,000 DKK, roughly 13,000€. There's no limit with the national system, Dankort.
Faster payments [0] is pretty much instant. Some banks have lower limits, and CHAPS[1] is same day and unlimited. I used faster payments for buying a car, and for paying a house deposit. My bank transferred my mortgage via CHAPS.
[0] https://www.starlingbank.com/resources/banking/guide-to-fast... [1] https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/what-is-a-chaps-paym...
and a normal check is the same as an ACH transfer, so I will do the ACH transfer
or lawyer's escrow
and every other larger transfer has been cryptocurrency in my life, its been over a decade of that unlimited amount, zero scrutiny, 24/7/365 option
the only time I'm personally using checks are because a new employer's HR system wants me to write VOID on a physical one, and I've opted to photoshopping a template with my account number and routing number, because checks are the same as an ACH transfer, and they could have just asked me to copy and paste those numbers into a input field
For notes especially I find the digital version preferable because it is automatically archived, searchable, and readily accessible across all my devices.
I'm in the US so I use permanent marker to write my lawyers phone number on my arm before protests
And yet as far as I can tell, most middle class Americans seem to refer to "their lawyer". Do you pay a monthly fee? Are they a criminal defence lawyer, or something broader? How often do you talk to them? How do you find them?
In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
(I know other apps have also done it, but having it on a built-in is really handy and it works well)
What do I have on me basically all the time? My phone.
I've done everything in Apple Notes for years now, and it's so much less hassle, and actually works for me. I just make sure to include words I might use to search for a note, when writing a new note. Search does the rest. I can and sometimes do organize things into directories, but usually it's kinda wasted effort. Search is enough.
Meanwhile, the few dozen pages scattered across four or five notebooks that I generated in that brief kick remain, passively, a pain in the ass. I've carted them through two moves, meaning to digitize them, because when I remember they exist and browse I'm like "oh yeah, that was a good idea!" but, out of sight out of mind and when I stumble across them I'm always in the middle of doing other, more important shit.
I don't have roommates, but if I did we'd probably use a whiteboard for tracking errands and schedules.
What date are you putting on the food? Every packaging here in Spain (and Europe I assume) has both the production date and "best before" dates printed on them from the factory, and stuff that doesn't have packaging you know if they're bad by looking/smelling/tasting.
For most foods evolution has graced us with the ability to see, smell or taste any issues well before they actually become a problem. There are some things you have to look out for like botulism or salmonella, but for simple foods like bread and milk there isn't much point in taking precautions
But then I am in UK where milk is easily obtained in 2 pint or less packages and is all long term - over a week. It is harder to gat 4 int or gallon containers which I think are more common in the US.
Except sometimes the 1/2 gallons will be randomly on sale where you can get like 3 of them for the price of a gallon. Milk economics makes no sense to me. But yeah, it's usually cheaper to buy more than you need and just throw it out if you don't use it, as is the American way.
I also label things like the date I install a new HVAC filter, or how much to cut off on a piece of lumber, etc.
Schools used to teach this a minimum but they no longer do. It was also standard to learn that for job hunting but, again, I don't think many people apply for jobs by post nowadays although it can still be useful to know how to write a formal cover letter.
Now I journal on a paper notebook, take daily notes on a whiteboard and I'm rediscovering index cards for long term storage, but I wish real life had a search function.
If I had an automated scanning + OCR + convert to Org system, I would never use a text editor for notes ever again.
I think that gives the improved retention plus easy filing of the result and if your writing is like mine the ability to actually read what you wrote a year before.
(I do some handwriting for notes taking, but that's some writing based on block letters, not script as in a signature)
I'm not sure I could ever prove I am who I say I am using my signature. My wife signs my name most of the time when it's necessary for a check or a health form for the kids or whatever. Whenever I go to vote, I try to sneak a look at their copy of the form to see how I signed it when I registered. I think my credit union has one 'on file' for me, but I'm sure it's nothing like how I actually sign my name and is from ~25 years ago.
I'm sure I do too, but I couldn't actually tell you what I used it for. Probably to cross items off a shopping list or sign my name on something. Actually we got a new car and I needed to sign the form at the DMV to get license plates, so I guess that was it.
I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.
Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive).
Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.
I'm probably younger than you by quite a bit.. no descendents, no time to travel, not allowed in many countries or US states anyway
I can pretty much guarantee it'd be an adventure for my teen, nearly adult, children.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address.
https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text."
Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).
Lol this is a bit ridiculous but a fun blogpost!
The FSF has moved a few times.
* 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge.
* 59 Temple Place, Boston
* 51 Franklin St, Boston
* 31 Milk Street, Boston
The first address wasn’t around for too long, but does still exist. It’s an office building above a bank in Central Square, Cambridge right above the Red Line stop.
The second address was around for a long, long time. A few years ago, the building was demolished and turned into a hotel. I don’t know if 59 Temple Place is still a valid address or not. For this one, I found many of most frequent places and filed bugs to get it updated. Greg K-H helped me update the kernel and many of the issues I opened got resolved with other projects. Worth noting too that the FSF had two different offices in the same building but mail would go to the building. Mail did forward from here to the next address for a while, but I’m not sure if it’ll forward again to the latest address.
51 Franklin St is just around the corner from 59 Temple Place. When they moved here, many staff were able to walk their stuff over to the new office. This one finally closed last year. I worked here my entire time at the FSF.
The final one is a PO Box but also around the corner from 51 Franklin St.
https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_23....
> The FSF Deluxe Distribution contains the binaries and sources to hundreds of different programs including GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger, the complete MIT X Window System, and the GNU utilities.
> You may choose one of these machines and operating systems: HP 9000 series 200, 300, 700, or 800 (4.3 BSD or HP-UX); RS/6000 (AIX); Sony NEWS 68k (4.3 BSD or NewsOS 4); Sun 3, 4, or SPARC (SunOS 4 or Solaris). If your machine or system is not listed, or if a specific program has not been ported to that machine, please call the FSF office at the phone number below or send e-mail to gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu.
> The manuals included are one each of the Bison, Calc, Gawk, GNU C Compiler, GNU C Library, GNU Debugger, Flex, GNU Emacs Lisp Reference, Make, Texinfo, and Termcap manuals; six copies of the manual for GNU Emacs; and a packet of reference cards each for GNU Emacs, Calc, the GNU Debugger, Bison, and Flex.
> In addition to the printed and on-line documentation, every Deluxe Distribution includes a CD-ROM (in ISO 9660 format with Rock Ridge extensions) that contains sources of our software.
I wonder how many (if any?) were sold, it'd be an excellent museum piece.
A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.
The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
There is a slight possibility we have a driver that you could get access to, but without the hardware it won't do you any good. Once in a while we have hacked the source to fix a bug, but if it isn't upstream it is because the fix would be accepted (often it causes other bugs that don't matter to use), and in any case if it isn't upstream, the kernel moves so fast you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.
So presumably as a hardware company you'd be offering your hardware with your custom linux installed, and then people wanting to audit or hack the product they bought would request the code from you.
I stopped putting in requests for source code offers because I've had a 0% success rate.
If this test was reproduced today, we may see different results ;)
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
> Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).
Edit for source: https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm
That's kind of awkward when you consider people will find that address for source code where that license file just wont be updated for decades to come, if at all.
In the old days when they released GPL v3, Linus Torvalds considered it "not the same license at all". He felt betrayed because the FSF "try to sneak in these new (tivoization) rules and try to force everybody to upgrade". People could fork the Kernel and relicense the fork in a way that prevented him from merging their improvements upstream. He referred to the FSF's move as "dishonest", "sneaky" and "immoral" and decided he would "never have anything to do with the FSF again".
When no version is specified in the request, returning the latest version seems like a reasonable thing to do.
https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d...
And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'
Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA
Really??
I have a really, really dumb question.
Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use?
Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark - we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it."
This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.
Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.
Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you..."
It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes.
Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?
To a specific point, though,
> Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.
Er, yes, that does sound bonkers; where are you that every school, church, and daycare isn't already doing a background check on every single person working there?
Someone has to be convicted for something to show up on their background check, yes?
So... like a social scorecard that's easily manipulated?
No.
You mean dropping some hard earned human right like Presumption of Innocence?
You may think it doesn't apply to you, but the landlords and HOA can add a similar clause, because children must be safe at home too. And every software company may add the same clause because they (may) have a game division and children must be safe online too. And ...
Suddenly, any accusation that a non-professional fake-judge says is "credible" makes you an outcast of society.
EULA, TOS, and Docusign have mostly forced people to forget their right to negotiate contracts because all they let you do is agree to the terms offered. So it seems natural today that people just want standard contracts for everything.
Lazyweb: what’s that story about the guy who redlined his credit card contract and the bank accepted it?
We have tons of them, they are written by lawyers.
Can this redirection be forever?
> no future organizations will be able to reside in that address
You are supposed to put the name, no? "Some Organization, <old address>" would unambiguously refer to the new org.
[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
The USPS doesn't honor either 301 or 308. As someone who moves just about every year, and fills out the paperwork to get my 301s and 308s for free, instead of paying a third-party service, I can tell you that the 301/308 at USPS is only good for one year.
To get around this, I used to use a 305: Use Proxy, but then my UPS Store of choice closed, and I was back to 301/308 land.
Wild that so many commenters don't see the satire dripping from the post. Is it just a UK thing to never take things at face value?
froh•4h ago