HankStallone

  find . -type f -name '*.foo' -not -path '*/.*' -print0 | xargs -0 grep bar

Persuading the voters is seen as a last resort, a distasteful task that really shouldn't be necessary, if we could just get the right systems in place to keep them pacified and voting for more of the same.

If you put Dave's blog in your RSS reader, one day "Dave (1)" shows up in your list of unread sources and you can read his new post immediately, and you didn't need to think about Dave's blog any other day.

I could use the "all articles" feed in my RSS reader (TT-RSS), but I would never do such a thing unless all the blogs I follow had similar posting frequencies that would mesh well together, which they don't. I never use the front page of Reddit for the same reason: the busy subs would drown out the ones that get a post a week.

Moving to something modern, even a language that's considered easy to learn like python, you very quickly get into more complicated concepts. That seems to have created a situation where the easier and more powerful we make programming for programmers, the more it gets out of reach of anyone else. Though there are still languages specifically for learning (like BASIC), so that doesn't have to be a problem.

But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.

We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.

And despite being slower, I'll often find that I've knocked out a couple pages pretty quickly once I get started. Getting started is the hard part.

Or, if you're not sure which a piece of writing is going to be when you start, you could tag the ones you want to save in your "proper journal" with a :JOURNAL: tag, and then refile those once in a while to a separate file.

I do a lot of captures which all go to refile.org, and then I go through that weekly or more often and refile items to other files where they belong. That makes it easy to jot down a thought down quickly, since I don't have to decide where it goes first.