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America’s weirdest guidebooks were funded by the government
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/xaCnm https://archive.is/xaCnm
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dqpb 5y agoWhat’s the point in posting paywalled nytimes articles?
- failwhaleshark 5y agoNot all of the browsers I use support browser extensions that could automagically un-paywall. Would it be ethical / legal for HN to automatically try using un-paywalling services for paywalled articles?
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoReader view almost always bypasses The NY Times paywall
- R0b0t1 5y agoMore often than not reader view does not work on paywalled articles for me.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIt doesn't work.
- pabs3 5y agoJust disabling cookies, CSS and JS bypasses the paywall.
- judge2020 5y agoFor certain IPs (probably determined by counting visits per day/week) nytimes and a few others, eg. wsj, seems to not even deliver the full article, instead only giving the first 2 paragraphs so if you don't have JS enabled you just don't get the article. Might be a reason why sites like outline.com have stopped supporting them.
- pabs3 5y agoThere is a simple fix for WSJ, just append this to the URL: ?mod=djemalertNEWS I haven't yet seen this with nytimes.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI swear I need a scriptlet for this because this is awesome.
- pabs3 5y agoThere is also a WebExtension that works with WSJ: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/ https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/
- failwhaleshark 5y agoYeap. I never get the article without some magic site.
- yesenadam 5y ago"Complaints about paywalls are off topic, so please don't post them." See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- dqpb 5y agoI don’t care, it’s annoying and stupid.
- schelling42 5y agoThey are often easily circumvented, e.g. by using services like archive.vn, or visiting the site with a referrer coming from google search.
- pomian 5y agoThanks neonate for archive link. Here is the best quote from the article: "Collect the county’s gophers in order to ship them to Australia, where they would be inoculated with a disease fatal to rabbits but harmless to the gophers..." The whole project reminds me of the Canadian TV commercials - funded by the government, "hinterland who's who". Growing up in Canada, watching these on TV, we never could figure out if they were serious or comedy. Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upR_s5rigVQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upR_s5rigVQ
- jollybean 5y agoThose hinterland-who's were mesmerizing, there's something very trippy about them. I think they were partly the inspiration for Boards of Canada.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThanks for sharing, I had seen a parody of those Hinterland videos a long time ago and now I feel like I have a much more thorough appreciation (https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I)
- motohagiography 5y agoThese were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using little factoids like those in Hinterland Who's Who as a common understanding. The logrider's waltz is another one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8, but you have to imagine what weird places the CBC and TV Ontario would have had to have been in the 50's and 60's, where it was a mix of turtlenecked beatnicks, remittence men, old family connected bureaucrats, with influential infiltrators from french separatist and foreign communist movements, Camp X instructors, and a bunch of political idealists spending relatively unlimited public money on inventing a new national identity. In hindsight, the 1970s, Polka-Dot Door was obviously an acid fueled propaganda machine, and Polkaroo, a giant dotted ambiguously gendered kangaroo friend that nobody else could see was the beginning of intersectionality. The future was imminently revolutionary and operated by a benevolent new intellectual class on systems like a new rumored Chilean technology called Cybersyn, which I am sure we sent agents to infiltrate and steal the blueprints of this amazing technology for ourselves to give us a national advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), and groups of conceptual artists formed networks that connected revolutionary politics with the young people of establishment society, e.g. General Idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea) All against a backdrop of those earth toned rainbows, the Olympics in Montreal, from a place where the future was beige, and unlimited cigarettes, courduroy, moustaches, LSD, and money for new technologies like portable recorders, theremins and synthesizers made it basically like a Trotskyist version of Mad Men meets early Star Trek. Canada is really, really weird. That's a show I'd watch anyway.
- throwleangovt 5y agoIn other words, they were funded by us taxpayers
- renewiltord 5y agoIt was from the Works Progress Administration so yeah but also practically everything else was also funded by us taxpayers back then. It was a kickstart project.
- mapster 5y agoYou exist because other people paid taxes.
- robertlagrant 5y agoIs this more or less accurate than the birds and the bees?
- tkgally 5y agoHere are Internet Archive scans of some of the books produced by the Federal Writers’ Project described in the article: “California: A Guide to the Golden State” https://archive.org/details/californiaguidet00federich/ https://archive.org/details/californiaguidet00federich/ “Missouri: A Guide to the ‘Show Me’ State” https://archive.org/details/missouriaguide00writmiss https://archive.org/details/missouriaguide00writmiss “New Orleans City Guide” https://archive.org/details/neworleanscitygu00federich https://archive.org/details/neworleanscitygu00federich From page 178 of the New Orleans book: “Parades may be viewed from the street, balconies, windows of homes and business houses, or from specially constructed tiers a story or so high. Each view has its advantage, but to mingle with the joyous crowd of the street is to feel the real spirit of the Carnival. Many await the parade on St. Charles and Canal Streets, for it is on these streets that the kings meet their queens: Momus and Comus at the Louisiana Club, 636 Gravier Street; Hermes at the City Hall, 543 St. Charles Street; Proteus at the Boston Club, 824 Canal Street. Although the varicolored lights of Canal Street give the parade a certain splendor, St. Charles Avenue is the better place to see a night parade. The avenue, with its beautiful homes and wide neutral ground, is not so highly lighted as Canal, and stars overhead wink back to the twinkling lights. Red-robed Negroes carry gasoline torches, calcium burners, and star-sparkling flares. “Soon after noon, when there is a night parade, ‘pop’ stands, hot dog counters, peanut wagons, cotton candy sheds, and souvenir boards sprout up along the streets like mushrooms after a spring rain. Cars, whose tops will be used as reviewing stands, are parked on the side streets near St. Charles Avenue. At five o’clock spectators begin to appear, and the crowd thickens so fast that one must walk in the streets. On the night of the parade all traffic along the way is rerouted to prevent interference. Children form human chains to whip through the crowd, and there is much laughter and noise.” https://archive.org/details/neworleanscitygu00federich/page/178/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/neworleanscitygu00federich/page/... A bibliography, with links to more books in the series, is here: http://www.digitalbookindex.com/_search/search010histus20fedwriproja.asp http://www.digitalbookindex.com/_search/search010histus20fed...
- perihelions 5y ago>"impecunious" is one of the *rarest* words I've ever seen in print, and I just want to digress to say I find this remarkable. In HN's comment history, it's only been used 13 times (i++). And half those appearances (including this comment) are meta. Four of them discussed the dictionary meaning, since pg had used it once in a 1998 essay and they too [0] thought this remarkable. Two more mocked the word's appearence in a 2016 Livejournal post about socioeconomics. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=impecunious&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?query=impecunious&type=comment&dateR... It's not obscure in every cultural sphere -- for example the NY Times has used it a fair number of times. Google's NGrams data suggest its popularity peaked in the 1880's. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impecunious&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cimpecunious%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impecunious&ye... [0] 'chops' in 2012: "In 1998, I had made an effort to do the whole "once a day, learn a random new word from the dictionary". I did that for exactly one day. The one word I learned was "impecunious." Up until now, I've never, ever, seen or heard that word used." "So in 1998, independent, near simultaneous events (Viaweb being acquired, and me learning a single word) were set in motion that would culminate 14 years later in me reading for the first time an actual legitimate use of that word, resulting in a very self-satisfied grin. Consider my day made." "It means "poor" btw." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071 And here I am in 2021 -- appending to this generational thread, linked not by [reply] buttons but esoteric search engine queries, for the next HN'er to discover in the distant future. This is HN's 14th occurrence of "impecunious". I am signing out.
- ac42 5y agoIt felt a bit less obscure once I figured the relationship to "pecuniary". Penniless!
- pwdisswordfish0 5y agoNot having read the article, only the comment, my first thought was “unprofitable”. I’m sure context would have made it clear, but I was still kind of shocked how far off I was.
- Animats 5y agoThis article seems to miss the context, unusual for the Times. The Writers' Project was part of the Works Progress Administration, a jobs program of the Great Depression. The Government put unemployed people to work. People who could do construction work built public buildings. Thousands of post offices, courthouses, and the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority were built. Rincon Center in San Francisco is perhaps the best Bay Area example. Artists were given art jobs; sometimes large murals in government buildings. Writers got writing jobs, hence these books.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoFrom the article: "four years earlier the Works Progress Administration had initiated an unprecedented scheme to pay thousands of unemployed writers to document America, its people, its locales and its heritage"
- ganzuul 5y agoA recession is a great time for vast infrastructure projects.
- cafard 5y agoThe WPA state guidebooks are quite interesting. The one for Washington, DC, is about the size of any three state guides put together: after WW II, George Washington University brought out a drastically edited version about the size of the standard state guide. I have a copy of the original, which is interesting (among many other ways) in having a map that shows older names of streets, streets not yet built in my neighborhood, etc.