Now, I boil the whole discussion down to the question "What price freedom?" - the sentiment of which is attributed to Jefferson but according to Gemini can be traced back to
John Philpot Curran
"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance"
The 7 billion or more current animal enslavers and devourers of the world would like to have a word, just in case some of have a few choice quotes on the nature of freedom as well.
> Its historic advantages—brand recognition, inexpensive outdoor access, and the prestige of Eagle Scout—once masked program defects.
I don't think the product sucked at all I think the packaging of that product was terrible. My father took me to a scout meeting when I was 13. Afterwards, he asked if I was interested. I said no - they really come across as Nazi Youth combined with religious fanaticism, and neither appeals to me.
One of the issues is that their historical strengths became weaknesses. Scouting integrated into existing infrastructure, which is why religion is such a prominent aspect. (It’s also why as mentioned elsewhere the politics around the LDS church became so recently important.) Boy Scouts was mostly and overlay that slotted on top of church youth programs. (Also other secular groups but that was smaller)
The shifting of religious practice in the US impacted scouting as well. Mainline Protestantism and Catholic Churches are on the decline - that’s the backbone. In the Catholic environment I grew up in, Boy Scouts kept kids engaged after communion with the parish.
The other issue with the model is that the local organization leadership reflected the old model. (ie. It’s a bunch of white dudes) The most traditional, growing communities who would be attracted to scouting with Catholic and Episcopal communities are Hispanic, Filipino and in my area Indian.
It is sad. I was involved from age 7-14 (when we moved) and loved it. But institutions only survive when they can grow themselves.
I was a Scout in four different places growing up. My family moved a lot. My experience (in the 1980s) is that program depended a lot on the priorities of local organizers. Anecdotally, I observed that in communities where Scouting was seen as important—measured by the percentage of children who participated-it was a positive experience.
My time as a Boy Scout in Maine was life changing. It was not just about activities and skills (although there were many), it’s clear that the leaders of that Troop saw Scouting as a kind of secular education in ethics and community. They made the various Scouting accomplishments (ranks, merit badges) feel like milestones along a path of self improvement. It felt important.
When my family left Maine, the local Troop was weird (the Hitler Youth comment by the earlier poster tracks) and activities consisted of playing checkers in a church basement. In particular, peer bullying of younger/new kids was routine. I lost interest at that point and stopped going.
It’s been difficult to follow news of Scouting’s decline for me, because I have seen how positive it CAN be. But perhaps local Troops like this are rare.
It varies a lot from troop to troop. Some really play up the paramilitary and religious aspects. Atheism is still officially not tolerated, but lots of troops gloss over the "God" aspect sitting front-and-center in the Oath and the Law.
Sorry you bumped into a troop that really sucked. I don't know if a different one would have suited you better.
When I was a child I was made to endure an organization called "Stockades". This was -- in the 1980s -- an extremely religious version of scouting. It... was not fun. After a few weeks of this, of literal begging and crying to not go, finally my parents relented. Neither of them had considered what a "stockade" really was: a place to barricade yourself inside for protection OR a literal prison. Neither seem appropriate for a child learning to take part in the world.
I have two "counterfeiting" stories - both of which are humorous even though one involve the Secret Service.
The first was in college. A buddy of mine scribbled a facsimile of a $20 onto a piece of paper with a green marker. He then handed it to the checkout clerk at the cafeteria who took it and started to hand them back change. He stopped her and said "no, no it's a joke - look at what I just handed you". She was embarrassed but they both laughed together.
The second story which does involve the Secret Service is when my friend had a bunch of presents that he had wrapped and put in his front porch until was going to depart for a party. One of the presents was wrapped in a sheet of uncut dollar bills - which you could buy for that purpose.
A neppy neighbor saw it through the window and called the police who called the FBI who called the Secret Service who came knocking on his door to investigate. They were also embarrassed but I don't think they laughed. My friend told him he understands that they're just doing their job and that it's an important one.
I remember my friend coming home from his first year in college and telling me about how he passed a counterfeit $30 he'd found to a clueless clerk and they actually made the correct change. My wise-ass response was that that wasn't actually counterfeit, it was just fraud.
If it's being passed off as money, then someone thought it was. I don't think the Secret Service cares if it's an invalid denomination or has Bozo the Clown on the front. Probably not a high priority for them given the overall lack of believability, but the attempt is what counts.
I don't think that the parent comment is making the case it's not a crime, but rather that it's not specifically counterfeiting. There comment reads as playfully snarky to me, since, when discussing counterfeit currency, we almost always take counterfeit to mean "to make a fraudulent replica of".
> XHTML failed in an era when writers (even normies) were writing some HTML of their own
I'd say it was a minority of writers that were handcrafting XHTML. And it was the case that everyone or their handcrafting or using tools could validate their compliance using a browser which made it very easy to adjust your tools or your handcrafted code. We are now in a situation where there is no schema for HTML.
I, for one, am very much in favor of forking the web with a document format with a schema. It really seems like a small and simple change to me.
Note that when I say "writing their own HTML", I don't mean handcrafting a whole webpage. I mean that people were writing i or b tags in their Wordpress editors or in online comment boxes, because back then such text fields did not have visual editors and would accept raw tags. Under XHTML, if the writer did not close tags properly, such input would have broken the whole page, so obviously back then such a standard was DOA.
Those cases were easy to fix by using eg htmltidy on the UGC.
Honestly I don't think it was killed by one thing, or by anything. Just no platform really cared and it wasn't a win for anyone and occasionally a loss.
I tried it out on a whim and it was really fun actually.
The only immediate improvement I could think of (which may be is there in the settings) is to change the zero point so I don't have to have the camera pointed at the floor.
Edit: can "zero" by clicking "begin" with phone pointed forward.
Basically anywhere you need to scan a QR code to get in, you can have a pass in Apple Wallet. I’ve never stored payment info in Apple Wallet. But every time I take a flight, I store my boarding pass in Apple Wallet. It’s than printing a physical boarding pass, it automatically updates metadata (e.g., flight times, gates), and it’s nicer than just a picture.
Previously, you could only add passes if the company supported it. So most airlines have Apple Wallet passes, but most gyms don’t. This update will allow you to create your own passes. Basically just storing the QR codes (and maybe some metadata?) in one easy-to-use place on your phone. I can imagine this being convenient for daily use so you don’t have to track a gym tag with a QR code and a library tag with a QR code, etc. Also nice for tickets to events.
I basically only fly one airline. But I generally try to store train passes, airline tickets, show tickets, etc. in the wallet when I can especially if I can't easily print a backup print copy--which is often an effort if I'm traveling.
What's the difference here between adding the "custom pass" and just taking a photo of QR code? Just the fact that it is stored in Wallet instead of photos folder?
It's stored in Wallet so you can access it through the Wallet shortcut (double-press power button), when you open it the screen automatically brightens, and it's a perfectly clear QR code rather than a picture so it'll be easier to scan.
Happened to me out on a group training run five years ago. She and I are now engaged and will be getting married in July.
When I still had a personal Reddit account, I would be on the dating and relationship subs and promote the idea to do something every week where you see the same people. even better do two or three such things every week. That's what I did, and I quickly went from zero local friends to dozens.
The gym is a fine place to do that but only if you're doing classes where there's an expectation that people will be socializing. I made some of my best friends in such gym classes including my current best friend. She indirectly introduced me to my fiancé because she suggested I join a running club to train.
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation.
Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
JSON Schema is an unofficial spec with a bunch of competitors and multiple versions, not all of which are compatible. I don't think you can compare it to XML schema validation.
I'm also not so sure about JSON being easier to map to common data structures. The lack of order guarantees within objects makes things like ordered maps quite annoying (you need to either use an array of entries with key and value, or an index within the mapped objects).
"Structured" in this case refers to being able to be directly mapped to a data structure. Think protobuf and other similar transport mechanisms. The recipient knows what structure to expect because it's not a valid XML document if it's breaking those constraints.
JSON is not, it is closer to the PHP, JS, etc "object" type, which is an ephemeral object with arbitrary member associations.
And, to be clear, this is not a value judgement. They just excel in different fields. XML tends to be easier for strongly and strictly typed languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, etc where you can use the schema to generate your structs automatically. Vanilla JSON is easier for higher level languages that don't require you to manually create a mapping/validation level. JSON Schema tries to bridge that gap to a degree, but isn't built into the standard and isn't even universal.
But, ultimately, both are perfectly sufficient for either use case. It just depends on how much massaging you want to do to make them work.
JSON Schema is largely an answer to people seeking that type of built-in validation. As I'm not a huge proponent for either (a tool is a tool and you work with it in its ecosystem), I don't have personal feelings on it's adequacy.
But, I would suspect, proponents of XML would still point to it's deeper typing system, document structure (especially the hierarchical features of it), and extremely mature ecosystem + tooling (such as XSLTs) as reasons to prefer it over JSON w/ JSON Schema.
Gotcha! Thanks for the rundown. I started programming at the time when we were transitioning from XMLHTTPRequest to Fetch with json so I know of XML but basically only learned about json.
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase
Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?
> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?
I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.
> I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML
I hear this too, but often when I ask why people say things like that, it's either because XML is "outdated" or because they don't like it.
It's like programs written in C or C++: very few large projects chose those languages nowadays, often for good reasons, so the projects written in those languages are usually 10 to 20 years old. Age comes with a lot of legacy cruft and obscure behaviour, but that's not the fault of those languages per se. Or for people blasting banks for using COBOL, even though COBOL is a perfectly fine high-performance language for the niches bank mainframes serve.
Basically it tells the system what elements are allowed in which places and what attributes they can contain.
<!ELEMENT html (head, body)>
Defines a html element that can contain a head and body, nothing else. Anything extra or missing will fail the validator.
It was kinda-sorta eventually superseded by XML Schema that could also define what KIND of data the attributes could contain, but did exist at the top of XML/HTML/SGML documents for years.
Ah interesting. Whenever I write an API I'll use Zod and whatever middlewares my framework needs to generate json schema for consumers, and whenever I consume an API I will use Zod to parse.
It would be nice if it were just built into the spec though!
"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance"
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