New and Old #272
Watered-down housing reforms, business-resident rural tensions, the low-key joy of going outside, and the lifespan of a tube TV
This is a good critique of Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s watering down of some important state-level housing bills:
The gulf between the campaign theme and enacted policy invites comparison to last year’s splashiest policy book– Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson–a pointed critique of Democratic politicians’ reticence to make difficult policy choices. They often allow procedural obstacles and organized local opposition to block broadly beneficial reforms. This approach to housing so far embodies these limitations. Rather than embracing her chance to expand opportunities for lower-cost housing construction, she chose to make some deference to local control and incumbent homeowners.
Even a governor feels pressure from local opposition to building things! Local control is not all bad, and certainly not local input. But this phenomenon of what are properly regional or statewide policies being distorted by numerous localities is not good, and it is a major factor not just in the housing shortage but in the general pattern of sprawl and the patchwork state of transit.
This is really interesting, and it speaks to the tension between businesses that draw crowds, and revenues, into rural areas, and the people who live there who see their communities as quiet and remote.
One of the issues here, I think, is preventing wineries and breweries from becoming basically shell companies or fronts for event venues, which is an issue that arose in the past, with wineries using licenses with tax benefits for events and making the minimum amount of wine technically necessary to qualify as wineries (that was the gist of it). So I thought this was interesting, the “usual and customary” bit:
The project reached an important benchmark earlier this month, when full board endorsed the framework for the changes that will be considered by a zoning committee. At that time, supervisors gave direction to consider removing the cap on the number of private parties and events that wineries, breweries and distilleries can host as long as the events related to product sales and are “usual and customary” to the industry.
And this, which is the core tension here:
Currently, various types of businesses in rural Loudoun are limited in the number of events they may host and the number of people who may attend those events. Lifting that restriction was opposed by residents who live near those businesses and say they suffer from increased traffic on roads not built for it, noise from late night parties, and light pollution. Business owners said that hosting events is a crucial part to keeping their operations profitable, especially when droughts, late frosts or impacts from invasive species can make farming difficult.
There may be some legitimate issues here (fire safety concerns as a reason to limit the number of attendees at a given event is not unreasonable, for example). But overall it sounds like a level of micromanaging that, I imagine, must exact a real cost on entrepreneurship and business success and, more invisibly, on the number of businesses which are ever started at all.
No Rules, Birding the Rachel Carson Trail, Elizabeth Pagel-Hogan, May 21, 2026
I startle a cardinal off her nest! I move on quickly so she can return to her work.
Finally, the trail turns away from 28 and the sounds of traffic diminish, then disappear.
I come to a hilltop with power lines. There’s a clearing and I hear a Wood Thrush do a “bubble wand” alert. I stop and listen and then I see a branch bouncing somewhat near to me. I lean to the left and there’s the Wood Thrush! It’s right in front of me about two feet off the ground! I think we’re both surprised to see each other and it flies away before I can snap a photo. But I still have a happy mental photo of my first of year Wood Thrush.
I walk along what is probably one of the top 10 most beautiful places on the trail. I find it really hard to rank my top 10, but this spot is a gorgeous field filled with plants and trees and bushes of different heights. And it’s full of birds! I come to a place where there’s a smell that smells nostalgic and it smells fresh and floral and spring. Just the smell of it sends endorphins and happiness rushing through my brain. I wish there was a Merlin for smells.
The first thing that occurs to me is how silly it is that birding is seen as a thing old people do, or whatever. Or that you need to do it the “right” way (I don’t know if professional birders think that way, but I’m sure some do—i.e., you’re not allowed to have fun, you have to follow imaginary gatekeeping rules, because the adversity is the point, blah blah blah).
But what a joyful little dispatch this is. It’s a reminder that you are actually allowed to put down the smartphone and go outside and pay attention to your surroundings. I know that sometimes I almost forget that; what started as a technological marvel we all wanted subtly becomes this thing to which you feel tethered.
I’m no professional birder, or really a birder at all, but I do remember long walks on the trail network when we used to live in Reston, Virginia (we’re only 10 minutes away now, but in a neighborhood with less of a trail network), and how nice and calming it was. I did see a cardinal feeding babies in a nest once. I saw fawns and deer, red foxes, a raccoon climbing out of a hole in a tree, pileated woodpeckers, and even a raccoon curled up, sleeping in a draining pipe! And I certainly remember those walks more distinctly than I remember all the hours I mindlessly scrolled my phone.
The lifespan of crt..How, if possible, can you measure how many hours does crt has?, Reddit
The original question is deleted, but this answer is really cool. It makes me think that probably all the “broken” TVs I ever came across really had good tubes and just bad electronics. I bet most people never knew that. (Even a missing color often indicates a problem in circuitry or electronics, not a dead electron gun).
Some sets will have an hour counter in the service menu. Professional monitors generally do.
The tube itself will just get weaker over time, and it can usually last for a long time. The tubes don’t get ‘broken’ as much as their quality goes down slowly, and eventually you figure out that it’s not good enough anymore. Or you get burn-in, but that shouldn’t happen unless you’re displaying something static.
This is generally only a worry on professional monitors which will have been on 24/7. There’s no way you’re gonna use a set for long enough after you get it that it’s gonna conk out or get drastically reduced image quality to the point you’d care, as long as it was good when you first got it, unless you genuinely intend to use it 8+ hours a day. Bad caps or other electronics are much more likely to fail, and usually possible to repair with the right know-how.
To give an example, my Trinitron from the late 90s says it has 40k+ hours on it in the service menu. It still looks fine to my eyes, and it’s not gonna break in any unfixable way for as long as I’m gonna use it. I think I’ve even seen a 100k hour BVM around here that was still good (other than the brightness having to be set higher than usual, which is to be expected). I’ve also witnessed a 60k hour BVM, that looked very good to my eyes.
TL;DR: Don’t worry. If the tube looks good when you get it, it’s not gonna get significantly worse over time unless you use it more than you probably should.
40,000 hours! That is—remarkably—50 years at two hours a day! I would take that to mean that under normal domestic use, a tube television basically lasts indefinitely. They were and are one of the most durable consumer products ever made.
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