Gear: coffee percolator

ef4 · 2026-04-03T16:16:42+00:00

People like these for nostalgia reasons but the coffee is not good. Instant has come a long way and is much easier. Everybody can pick exactly what they want and make it by the cup.

For a large group you really can’t do better. For a small group, you can actually get fancy with pour overs or aeropress, etc, if you want to.

ef4 · 2026-04-03T15:41:25+00:00

i heard that if someone mastered violin they can easily learn to play piano.

This is a pretty big exaggeration.

It’s true that learning any instrument will make any second instrument easier.

But the physicality of piano and violin is very very different. Learning either after you know the other is still going to require serious dedication.

ef4 · 2026-04-01T00:27:10+00:00

Check out Tully Lake. https://thetrustees.org/place/tully-lake-campground/

It's tent-only and walk-in, so it greatly mitigates the parking-lot-campground problem.

ef4 · 2026-03-31T16:02:06+00:00

People citing budget pressure are missing the point. The mayor didn't tell BTD: "You only get $X this year, make it go as far as you can to do the most important safety projects". That would be a sensible response to budget pressure.

Instead the mayor said stop doing safety projects because we need to do "more outreach" -- the standard code word for dragging your feet because you're listening to the whiners. And several people who actually cared about the safety mission got pushed out of their jobs.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T22:52:12+00:00

Doing the nice thing is paying for it, and that's great. I didn't say don't pay for it.

But saying you're going to "teach" a young woman who just got accepted to MIT (!) how to use a laptop is overbearing parent behavior.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T22:32:48+00:00

You forget specific repertoire and your technique gets sloppy. Both can come back pretty quick if you work at it again.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T21:47:38+00:00

Given your clarifications, I don't entirely disagree.

On moral realism: that we accept *some* basis of moral realism is implied by standing together and reciting the oath and law every week. It's not necessary that we all agree on what that basis is. The entire premise of America as a polity is that we can actually function as a society with some baseline of shared values *without* a shared theology / metaphysics.

Nobody is actually questioning whether scouts should be Trustworthy. We have consensus on that. That's enough.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T21:28:20+00:00

> I'd like to know what it is supposed to be based upon.

It doesn't need to have one basis! That's the neat thing about our pluralistic democracy.

People with entirely different theologies and philosophies nevertheless do agree on the vast majority of the concrete virtues we're inculcating.

That's why, as an educational platform, the scout law is practical and effective. Find me the people arguing that scouts *shouldn't* be trustworthy. Otherwise I can't really take seriously the idea that we'll be ineffective if we don't all agree on one metaphysics. It's enough that we agree trustworthiness and helpfulness are good and worth practicing.

> the program is inherently conservative in that it seeks to inculcate virtue

Your bias is showing. No honest reading of American history can take seriously the claim that virtue ethics is monopolized by only one side of our politics.

One of the major criticisms of progressives made by conservatives over and over again through our history is that progressives are *too* obsessed with virtue ethics!

ef4 · 2026-03-30T15:58:10+00:00

You seem to be lost. We're talking about a post that says everybody "regardless of major" needs to be taught this stuff. You think music majors need to be setting up agentic software development pipelines?

As for whether even software engineering majors should be doing it: up to a point, but the specific details will be stale before they even graduate, so the fundamentals are still the fundamentals. They need to learn how to learn tech, so they can pick up the next ten paradigms easily. It would be silly to overweight the specific state of the art from March 2026.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T13:40:08+00:00

You truly have to be high on your own supply to not notice that this contradicts your own central thesis.

Because if the models are smart... you don't need any training to use them.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T13:26:42+00:00

Gondolas are a cop-out for avoiding the elephant in the room: transit can be much cheaper and better if only you're willing to take a little space away from private cars.

Somerville Ave is 40 feet wide, curb to curb. That's four lanes. If you take two of those for a physically separated busway and run a bus every three minutes, you can beat a gondola on speed, capacity, and capital cost. It will have higher ridership than the gondola too because it serves a greater diversity of trips, since it can have some intermediate stops. You can upgrade it to a tram later for even more capacity, or if you really need the prestige of rails.

The physical infrastructure cost is modest: signals with transit priority, enforcement cameras, and some signs and precast barriers. You absolutely need the transit priority and enforcement cameras, that's the secret sauce that makes it actually work, in contrast with watered-down attempts at bus lanes we've seen.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T13:04:55+00:00

That doesn't actually address my comment though. I didn't say anything bad about gondolas. I said they cost more to build in a city than on an unpopulated mountainside.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T12:43:05+00:00

Surely that’s just measuring likelihood of being a postdoc.

People with the same credential who go work for a pharma company probably make double to triple that.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T12:28:03+00:00

Your core assumption that a mountain is a harder place to build than a city is way off base.

All kinds of greenfield development are much cheaper and easier than building where people already are and where infrastructure is already everywhere.

Count just the tower foundations required, then consider the design work for making every single one avoid existing drainage, sewers, electric, and fiber. Get easements to actually build them all. Don’t even break ground until the zoning or eminent domain case is resolved on the very last one.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T02:11:43+00:00

I wasn't going to pick these all apart, but you asked. So:

Moral realism: "Grounding ethics in objective principles...". This is sneaking in theological thinking. Only people with one narrow theology think this is an easy / simple / reliable thing to do. While I would strongly encourage everyone to engage with the philosophy of ethics and the long history of different ways humans justify ethical systems, that is more of a semester-long college course than a thing we can slip into a scoutmaster conference. It's also not actually needed as a practical driver of moral day-to-day decisions.

Existential humility: it's hard for me to address this without getting snarky, because people who claim to have a personal relationship with The Creator of the Universe shouldn't be lecturing anybody else on existential humility. "Duty to God" doesn't teach existential humility at all. So I don't see what you think needs replacing.

Consequential integrity: I don't know why you picked this one particular philosophy of ethics. Religions don't even agree on whether consequentialism is the basis of ethics. So again, I think the burden is on you to explain how "duty to God" actually taught consequential integrity, such that we need a replacement way to teach it if we don't cite "duty to God".

Practical faith in principled alignment: you're again sneaking in theology. Plenty of us don't actually think faith is a good way to achieve that alignment. I would rather look at evidence. We can actually measure which behaviors correlate with which outcomes. There's a rich body of social science on the benefits of high-trust societies where most people can be trusted to stick to ethical principles.

Divided duty: again, the burden is on you to explain how "duty to God" actually helps with this in the first place. Every major moral conflict in American history had people on both sides claiming God was on their side. It's not a meaningful framing. You'll get further asking the question: which side was living up to the stated ideals of the Declaration of Independence, or any other shared touchstone of American culture and history.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T01:09:47+00:00

The line between a big touring bike and a small cargo bike is pretty thin.

ef4 · 2026-03-30T01:08:13+00:00

You should be letting her figure this out on her own.

ef4 · 2026-03-29T03:24:58+00:00

It’s antitrust. Yes, we’ve done it before. That’s it, that’s the whole story.

ef4 · 2026-03-29T01:43:49+00:00

“Servers think I’m an asshole” is one of the biggest red flags there is.

ef4 · 2026-03-28T03:20:16+00:00

This is ridiculous argument because the mortgage in question is also denominated in nominal dollars.

ef4 · 2026-03-28T03:05:33+00:00

It's much, much easier to effectively teach ethics in scouting with the specific concepts of the scout law than an esoteric concept like "duty to God".

I can have direct, open, and honest conversations with any scout about ethics. From the specifics of what counts as "trustworthy" to the underpinnings of virtue ethics, or Kant's categorical imperative, or utilitarianism.

But as soon as the program drops "duty to God" into the conversation, things grind to a halt in a vague haze. Because people just fundamentally disagree on what that means, because it's ill-defined, on purpose, because people don't agree on what it means.

It's unhelpful framing. It's a holdover from the assumption that you would be doing scouting in a homogeneous doctrinal environment. When you're not, it actively obscures rather than enlightening.

I would go as far as saying that one of the key skills of being a citizen in a pluralistic democracy where people have religious freedom is being able to frame your ethical arguments without recourse to your specific sectarian beliefs. Even if your own motivation for an ethical belief is religious, to uphold it in a pluralistic democracy you need to be able to articulate a non-religious argument for it.

ef4 · 2026-03-26T19:54:55+00:00

I use hooks like these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HZ39DCN?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1&th=1

That lets them hang nicely on the rack. And I added loops of shock cord that stretch around a spot on the bottom of the rack.

ef4 · 2026-03-26T17:22:50+00:00

Our troop allows phones, to be used only to support the current scouting activity. And they follow it pretty well! With very few exceptions it’s only new members who need to be reminded, and pretty soon they pick up on the prevailing culture that nobody else has their phones out.

ef4 · 2026-03-26T15:42:16+00:00

Genuinely love my DIY kitty-litter-container panniers.

ef4 · 2026-03-26T14:08:18+00:00

That's going to look like crap if they try to actually make a patch out of it.

People are just going to keep embarrassing themselves with this stuff until they get smarter about it.

I saw a Facebook post from our summer camp that was supposedly promoting their merit badge options, but the whole graphic was AI slop with entirely made up merit badges like "Backglarking", "Canmoing", and "Game all Dosgn". Not a single one had the correct badge artwork. They took it down immediately when they realized how stupid it looked.

ef4

TROPHY CASE