automattic

Digital Dustbusting

tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at work!

At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.

I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!), deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of different things that need testing!

I can simplify, I figured. So I did.

And in doing so, I rediscovered several old projects I’d neglected or forgotten about. I wonder if anybody’s still using any of them?

Hosting I’ve tidied so far…

Cheating Hangman is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
DNDle, my Wordle-clone where you have to guess the Dungeons & Dragons 5e monster’s stat block, is now hosted by GitHub Pages. Also, I fixed an issue reported a month ago that meant that I was reporting Giant Scorpions as having a WIS of 19 instead of 9.
Abnib, which mostly reminds people of upcoming birthdays and serves as a dumping ground for any Abnib-related shit I produce, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
RockMonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t really do much any more, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
EGXchange, my implementation of a digital wallet for environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency EmmaGoldCoin, which I’ve written about before, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Sour Grapes, the single-page promo for a (remote) murder mystery party I hosted during a COVID lockdown, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
A convenience-page for giving lost people directions to my house is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Dan Q’s Things is now automatically built on a schedule and hosted by GitHub Pages.
Robin’s Improbable Blog, which spun out from 52 Reflect, wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify “proper” hosting so now it sits in a Docker container on my NAS.
My μlogger server, which records my location based on pings from my phone, has also moved to my NAS. This has broken Find Dan Q, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue with that in its current form anyway.
All of my various domain/subdomain redirects have been consolidated on, or are in the process of moving to, to a tiny Linode/Akamai instance. It’s a super simple plain Nginx server that does virtually nothing except redirect people – this is where I’ll park the domains I register but haven’t found a use for yet, in future.

It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub Actions was a useful exercise.

Stuff I’m still to tidy…

There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:

DanQ.me

This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g. code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.

FreeDeedPoll.org.uk

Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic sabbatical this winter.

A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.

Geohashing.site

When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!

My FreshRSS instance

Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.

Next steps

It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!

Note #24599

At work, we recently switched expenses system to one with virtual credit card functionality. I decided to test it out by buying myself lounge access for my upcoming work trip to Mexico. Unfortunately the new system mis-detected my lounge access as being a purchase from lingerie company loungeunderwear.com. I’m expecting a ping from Finance any moment to ask me why I’m using a company credit card to buy a bra.

One might ask why our expenses provider can (mis-)identify loungeunderwear.com from a transaction in the first place. Did somebody at some company that uses this provider actually buy some ladies’ briefs on a company credit card at some point?

WP Engine’s Three Problems

Duration 11:08

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

If you’re active in the WordPress space you’re probably aware that there’s a lot of drama going on right now between (a) WordPress hosting company WP Engine, (b) WordPress hosting company (among quite a few other things) Automattic¹, and (c) the WordPress Foundation.

If you’re not aware then, well: do a search across the tech news media to see the latest: any summary I could give you would be out-of-date by the time you read it anyway!

A declaration of war?

Like others, I’m not sure that the way Matt publicly called-out WP Engine at WCUS was the most-productive way to progress a discussion².

In particular, I think a lot of the conversation that he kicked off conflates three different aspects of WP Engine’s misbehaviour. That muddies the waters when it comes to having a reasoned conversation about the issue³.

Matt Mullwenweg on stage at WordCamp US 2024, stating how he feels that WP Engine exploits WordPress (to great profit) without contributing back. — I’ve heard Matt speak a number of times, including in person… and I think he did a pretty bad job of expressing the problems with WP Engine during his Q&A at WCUS. In his defence, it sounds like he may have been still trying to negotiate a better way forward until the very second he walked on stage that day.

I don’t think WP Engine is a particularly good company, and I personally wouldn’t use them for WordPress hosting. That’s not a new opinion for me: I wouldn’t have used them last year or the year before, or the year before that either. And I broadly agree with what I think Matt tried to say, although not necessarily with the way he said it or the platform he chose to say it upon.

Misdeeds

As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical⁴, and legal.

Morally: don’t take without giving back

Matt observes that since WP Engine’s acquisition by huge tech-company-investor Silver Lake, WP Engine have made enormous profits from selling WordPress hosting as a service (and nothing else) while making minimal to no contributions back to the open source platform that they depend upon.

If true, and it appears to be, this would violate the principle of reciprocity. If you benefit from somebody else’s effort (and you’re able to) you’re morally-obliged to at least offer to give back in a manner commensurate to your relative level of resources.

Two children sit on a bed: one hands a toy dinosaur to the other. — The principle of reciprocity is a moral staple. This is evidenced by the fact that *children* (and some nonhuman animals) *seem to be able to work it out for themselves* from first principles using nothing more than empathy. Companies, however aren’t usually so-capable. Photo courtesy Cotton.

Abuse of this principle is… sadly not-uncommon in business. Or in tech. Or in the world in general. A lightweight example might be the many millions of profitable companies that host atop the Apache HTTP Server without donating a penny to the Apache Foundation. A heavier (and legally-backed) example might be Trump Social’s implementation being based on a modified version of Mastodon’s code: Mastodon’s license requires that their changes are shared publicly… but they don’t do until they’re sent threatening letters reminding them of their obligations.

I feel like it’s fair game to call out companies that act amorally, and encourage people to boycott them, so long as you do so without “punching down”.

Ethically: don’t exploit open source’s liberties as weaknesses

WP Engine also stand accused of altering the open source code that they host in ways that maximise their profit, to the detriment of both their customers and the original authors of that code⁵.

It’s well established, for example, that WP Engine disable the “revisions” feature of WordPress⁶. Personally, I don’t feel like this is as big a deal as Matt makes out that it is (I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying “WP Engine is not WordPress”): it’s pretty commonplace for large hosting companies to tweak the open source software that they host to better fit their architecture and business model.

But I agree that it does make WordPress as-provided by WP Engine significantly less good than would be expected from virtually any other host (most of which, by the way, provide much better value-for-money at any price point).

It also looks like WP Engine may have made more-nefarious changes, e.g. modifying the referral links in open source code (the thing that earns money for the original authors of that code) so that WP Engine can collect the revenue themselves when they deploy that code to their customers’ sites. That to me feels like it’s clearly into the zone ethical bad practice. Within the open source community, it’s not okay to take somebody’s code, which they were kind enough to release under a liberal license, strip out the bits that provide their income, and redistribute it, even just as a network service⁸.

Again, I think this is fair game to call out, even if it’s not something that anybody has a right to enforce legally. On which note…

Legally: trademarks have value, don’t steal them

Automattic Inc. has a recognised trademark on WooCommerce, and is the custodian of the WordPress Foundation’s trademark on WordPress. WP Engine are accused of unauthorised use of these trademarks.

Obviously, this is the part of the story you’re going to see the most news media about, because there’s reasonable odds it’ll end up in front of a judge at some point. There’s a good chance that such a case might revolve around WP Engine’s willingness (and encouragement?) to allow their business to be called “WordPress Engine” and to capitalise on any confusion that causes.

I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of the legal case: I Am Not A Lawyer and all that. Naturally I agree with the underlying principle that one should not be allowed to profit off another’s intellectual property, but I’ll leave discussion on whether or not that’s what WP Engine are doing as a conversation for folks with more legal-smarts than I. I’ve certainly known people be confused by WP Engine’s name and branding, though, and think that they must be some kind of “officially-licensed” WordPress host: it happens.

If you’re following all of this drama as it unfolds… just remember to check your sources. There’s a lot of FUD floating around on the Internet right now⁹.

In summary…

With a reminder that I’m sharing my own opinion here and not that of my employer, here’s my thoughts on the recent WP Engine drama:

WP Engine certainly act in ways that are unethical and immoral and antithetical to the spirit of open source, and those are just a subset of the reasons that I wouldn’t use them as a WordPress host.
Matt Mullenweg calling them out at WordCamp US doesn’t get his point across as well as I think he hoped it might, and probably won’t win him any popularity contests.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on whether or not WP Engine have violated the WordPress Foundation’s trademarks, but I suspect that they’ve benefitted from widespread confusion about their status.

Footnotes

¹ I suppose I ought to point out that Automattic is my employer, in case you didn’t know, and point out that my opinions don’t necessarily represent theirs, etc. I’ve been involved with WordPress as an open source project for about four times as long as I’ve had any connection to Automattic, though, and don’t always agree with them, so I’d hope that it’s a given that I’m speaking my own mind!

² Though like Manu, I don’t think that means that Matt should take the corresponding blog post down: I’m a digital preservationist, as might be evidenced by the unrepresentative-of-me and frankly embarrassing things in the 25-year archives of this blog!

³ Fortunately the documents that the lawyers for both sides have been writing are much clearer and more-specific, but that’s what you pay lawyers for, right?

⁴ There’s a huge amount of debate about the difference between morality and ethics, but I’m using the definition that means that morality is based on what a social animal might be expected to decide for themselves is right, think e.g. the Golden Rule etc., whereas ethics is the code of conduct expected within a particular community. Take stealing, for example, which covers the spectrum: that you shouldn’t deprive somebody else of something they need, is a moral issue; that we as a society deem such behaviour worthy of exclusion is an ethical one; meanwhile the action of incarcerating burglars is part of our legal framework.

⁵ Not that nobody’s immune to making ethical mistakes. Not me, not you, not anybody else. I remember when, back in 2005, Matt fucked up by injecting ads into WordPress (which at that point didn’t have a reliable source of funding). But he did the right thing by backpedalling, undoing the harm, and apologising publicly and profusely.

⁶ WP Engine claim that they disable revisions for performance reasons, but that’s clearly bullshit: it’s pretty obvious to me that this is about making hosting cheaper. Enabling revisions doesn’t have a performance impact on a properly-configured multisite hosting system, and I know this from personal experience of running such things. But it does have a significant impact on how much space you need to allocate to your users, which has cost implications at scale.

⁷ As an aside: if a court does rule that WP Engine is infringing upon WordPress trademarks and they want a new company name to give their service a fresh start, they’re welcome to TurdPress.

⁸ I’d argue that it is okay to do so for personal-use though: the difference for me comes when you’re making a profit off of it. It’s interesting to find these edge-cases in my own thinking!

⁹ A typical Reddit thread is about 25% lies-and-bullshit; but you can double that for a typical thread talking about this topic!

Idea: Meeting Spoofer

Focus time is great

I’m a big fan of blocking out uninterrupted time on your work calendar for focus activities, even if you don’t have a specific focus task to fill them with.

It can be enough to simple know that, for example, you’ve got a 2-hour slot every Friday morning that you can dedicate to whatever focus-demanding task you’ve got that week, whether it’s a deep debugging session, self-guided training and development activities, or finally finishing that paper that’s just slightly lower priority than everything else on your plate.

I appreciate that my colleagues respect that blocked period: I almost never receive meeting requests in that time. That’s probably because most people, particularly because we’re in such a multi-timezone company, use their calendar’s “find a suitable time for everybody” tool to find the best time for everyone and it sees that I’m “busy” and doesn’t suggest it.

If somebody does schedule a meeting that clashes with that block then, well, it’s probably pretty urgent!

But it turns out this strategy doesn’t work for everybody:

My partner recently showed me a portion of her calendar, observing that her scheduled focus time had been overshadowed by four subsequently-created meetings that clashed with it. Four!

Maybe that’s an exception and this particular occasion really did call for a stack of back-to-back urgent meetings. Maybe everything was on fire. But whether or not this particular occasion is representative for my partner, I’ve spoken to other friends who express the same experience: if they block out explicit non-meeting time on their calendar, they get meeting requests for that time anyway. At many employers, “focus time” activities don’t seem to be widely-respected.

Maybe your workplace is the same. The correct solution probably involves a cultural shift: a company-wide declaration in favour of focus time as a valuable productivity tool (which it is), possibly coupled with recommendations about how to schedule them sensitively, e.g. perhaps recommending a couple of periods in which they ought to be scheduled.

But for a moment, let’s consider a different option:

A silly solution?

Does your work culture doesn’t respect scheduled focus time but does respect scheduled meetings? This might seem to be the case in the picture above: note that the meetings that clash with the focus time don’t clash with one another but tessellate nicely. Perhaps you need… fake meetings.

Calendar showing (fake) meetings titled "SN / AFU Project Update", "Team ID107 training session", "Biological Interface Error Scheduling Meeting", and "(Rescheduled) ADIH Planning". — “Wow, what a busy afternoon Dan’s got. I’d better leave him be.”

Of course, creating fake meetings just so you can get some work done is actually creating more work. Wouldn’t it be better if there were some kind of service that could do it for you?

Here’s the idea: a web service that exposes an API endpoint. You start by specifying a few things about the calendar you’d like to fill, for example:

What days/times you’d like to fill with “focus time”?
What industry you work in, to help making convincing (but generic) event names?
Whether you’d like the entire block consistently filled, or occasional small-but-useless gaps of up to 15 minutes inserted between them?

This results in a URL containing those parameters. Accessing that URL yields an iCalendar feed containing those meetings. All you need to do is get your calendar software to subscribe to those events and they’ll appear in your calendar, “filling” your time.

So long as your iCalendar feed subscription refreshes often enough, you could even have an option to enable the events to self-delete e.g. 15 minutes before their start time, so that you don’t panic when your meeting notification pops up right before they “start”!

This is the bit where you’re expecting me to tell you I made a thing

Normally, you’d expect me to pull the covers off some hilarious domain name I’ve chosen and reveal exactly the service I describe, but I’m not doing that today. There’s a few reasons for that:

Firstly, I’ve got ~~enough~~ too many pointless personal/side projects on the go already¹. I don’t need another distraction.
Secondly, it turns out others have already done 90% of the work. This open-source project runs locally and fills calendars with (unnamed, private) blocks of varying lengths. This iOS app does almost exactly what I described, albeit in an ad-hoc rather than fully-automated way. There’s no point me just doing the last 10% just to make a joke work.
And thirdly: while I searched for existing tools I discovered a significant number of people who confess online to creating fake meetings in their calendars! While some of these do so for reasons like those I describe – i.e. to block out time and get more work done in an environment that doesn’t respect them simply blocking-out time – a lot of folks admit to doing it just to “look busy”. That could be either the employee slacking off, or perhaps having to work around a manager with a presenteeism/input-measurement based outlook (which is a terrible way to manage people). But either way: it’s a depressing reason to write software.

Nope

So yeah: I’m not going down that avenue.

But maybe if you’re in a field where you’d benefit from it, try blocking out some focus time in your calendar. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and I love that I’m employed somewhere that I can do so and it works out.

Or if you’ve tried that and discovered that your workplace culture doesn’t respect it – if colleagues routinely book meetings into reserved spaces – maybe you should try fake meetings and see if they’re any better-respected. But I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.

Footnotes

¹ Consider, for example, how I’m trying to take a photo of my dog, with her tongue stuck out, every day of this month.

Dan Q found GC4MHJ0 Octo (MK Artwalks)

This checkin to GC4MHJ0 Octo (MK Artwalks) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Today’s the last of three consecutive days that I’ve spent working in Milton Keynes. On each day I’ve taken a short walk while I’ve eaten my lunch to find a nearby geocache. This was today’s.

After admiring the sculpture I snapped a selfie while I waited for my GPS signal to settle. The coordinates and the hint made the location seem obvious, yet somehow I did three laps of the hiding place before I reached down to what by all accounts was, indeed, an obvious hiding place!

Muggles weren’t too multitudinous, so I soon had the cache hidden again back in its snug little spot. TFTC!

Dan Q found GC2GR3Z The Brass Bands of MK – Secklow Brass

This checkin to GC2GR3Z The Brass Bands of MK - Secklow Brass reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’ve been working in Milton Keynes the tail end of this week while my kids attend a ski camp at the X-scape centre. While eating my lunch today I came out for a walk to find this geocache.

Approaching from the direction of the car park was definitely the right route and I was soon standing at GZ alongside a likely host. I had to search for some time, though, before I found this surprisingly we’ll-concealed cache.

(I was hindered perhaps by my own eagerness to check the hint, which left me searching several feet lower down than the container eventually turned out to be!)

Right, back to work for me! TFTC.

Note #24370

Step/ski into my office! Today I’m working from a cafe overlooking an indoor ski slope where my kids are having lessons!

VaultPress to the Rescue

OMG VaultPress Jetpack Backup to the rescue.

One of the best Internet people drew me a picture and when I replied to it, it got scrambled. 😱

But even though I had to modify core WordPress columns to store drawings, the backup respected that and I was able to restore it.

I used to pay for VaultPress. Nowadays I get it for free as one of the many awesome perks of my job. But I’d probably still pay for it because it’s a lifesaver.

The Sprint Plan And The Noise

Power’s out yet again at my house (though not for the last reason nor because of our weird wiring: this time it’s for tree trimming), so here I am in my favourite coworking-friendly local cafe with The Signal And The Noise (which I’ve talked about before) in my ears and a whole lot of sprint planning at my fingertips.

Awtomattig

If Automattic had been founded in Wales instead of the USA:

Window Tax

Duration 8:11

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

…in England and Wales

From 1696 until 1851 a “window tax” was imposed in England and Wales¹. Sort-of a precursor to property taxes like council tax today, it used an estimate of the value of a property as an indicator of the wealth of its occupants: counting the number of windows provided the mechanism for assessment.

Window tax replaced an earlier hearth tax, following the ascension to the English throne of Mary II and William III of Orange. Hearth tax had come from a similar philosophy: that you can approximate the wealth of a household by some aspect of their home, in this case the number of stoves and fireplaces they had.

(A particular problem with window tax as enacted is that its “stepping”, which was designed to weigh particularly heavily on the rich with their large houses, was that it similarly weighed heavily on large multi-tenant buildings, whose landlord would pass on those disproportionate costs to their tenants!)

Why a window tax? There’s two ways to answer that:

A window tax – and a hearth tax, for that matter – can be assessed without the necessity of the taxpayer to disclose their income. Income tax, nowadays the most-significant form of taxation in the UK, was long considered to be too much of an invasion upon personal privacy³.
But compared to a hearth tax, it can be validated from outside the property. Counting people in a property in an era before solid recordkeeping is hard. Counting hearths is easier… so long as you can get inside the property. Counting windows is easier still and can be done completely from the outside!

…in the Netherlands

I recently got back from a trip to Amsterdam to meet my new work team and get to know them better.

Dan, by a game of table football, throws his arms into the air as if in self-celebration. — There were a few work-related/adjacent activities. But also a table football tournament, among other bits of fun.

One of the things I learned while on this trip was that the Netherlands, too, had a window tax for a time. But there’s an interesting difference.

The Dutch window tax was introduced during the French occupation, under Napoleon, in 1810 – already much later than its equivalent in England – and continued even after he was ousted and well into the late 19th century. And that leads to a really interesting social side-effect.

Dan, with four other men, sit in the back of a covered boat on a canal. — My brief interest in 19th century Dutch tax policy was piqued during my team’s boat tour.

Glass manufacturing technique evolved rapidly during the 19th century. At the start of the century, when England’s window tax law was in full swing, glass panes were typically made using the crown glass process: a bauble of glass would be spun until centrifugal force stretched it out into a wide disk, getting thinner towards its edge.

The very edge pieces of crown glass were cut into triangles for use in leaded glass, with any useless offcuts recycled; the next-innermost pieces were the thinnest and clearest, and fetched the highest price for use as windows. By the time you reached the centre you had a thick, often-swirly piece of glass that couldn’t be sold for a high price: you still sometimes find this kind among the leaded glass in particularly old pub windows⁵.

As the 19th century wore on, cylinder glass became the norm. This is produced by making an iron cylinder as a mould, blowing glass into it, and then carefully un-rolling the cylinder while the glass is still viscous to form a reasonably-even and flat sheet. Compared to spun glass, this approach makes it possible to make larger window panes. Also: it scales more-easily to industrialisation, reducing the cost of glass.

The Dutch window tax survived into the era of large plate glass, and this lead to an interesting phenomenon: rather than have lots of windows, which would be expensive, late-19th century buildings were constructed with windows that were as large as possible to maximise the ratio of the amount of light they let in to the amount of tax for which they were liable⁶.

That’s an architectural trend you can still see in Amsterdam (and elsewhere in Holland) today. Even where buildings are renovated or newly-constructed, they tend – or are required by preservation orders – to mirror the buildings they neighbour, which influences architectural decisions.

Pre-WWI Neighbourhood gathering in Amsterdam, with enormous windows (especially on the ground floor) visible. — Notice how each building has only between one and three windows on the ground floor, letting as much light in while minimising the tax burden.

It’s really interesting to see the different architectural choices produced in two different cities as a side-effect of fundamentally the same economic choice, resulting from slightly different starting conditions in each (a half-century gap and a land shortage in one). While Britain got fewer windows, the Netherlands got bigger windows, and you can still see the effects today.

…and social status

But there’s another interesting this about this relatively-recent window tax, and that’s about how people broadcast their social status.

In some of the traditionally-wealthiest parts of Amsterdam, you’ll find houses with more windows than you’d expect. In the photo above, notice:

How the window density of the central white building is about twice that of the similar-width building on the left,
That a mostly-decorative window has been installed above the front door, adorned with a decorative leaded glass pattern, and
At the bottom of the building, below the front door (up the stairs), that a full set of windows has been provided even for the below-ground servants quarters!

When it was first constructed, this building may have been considered especially ostentatious. Its original owners deliberately requested that it be built in a way that would attract a higher tax bill than would generally have been considered necessary in the city, at the time. The house stood out as a status symbol, like shiny jewellery, fashionable clothes, or a classy car might today.

Cheerful white elderly man listening to music through headphones that are clearly too large for him. — I originally wanted to insert a picture here that represented how one might show status through fashion today. But then I remembered I don’t know anything about fashion⁷. But somehow my stock image search suggested *this* photo, and I love it so much I’m using it anyway. You’re welcome.

How did we go wrong? A century and a bit ago the super-wealthy used to demonstrate their status by showing off how much tax they can pay. Nowadays, they generally seem more-preoccupied with getting away with paying as little as possible, or none⁸.

Can we bring back 19th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please?⁹

Footnotes

¹ Following the Treaty of Union the window tax was also applied in Scotland, but Scotland’s a whole other legal beast that I’m going to quietly ignore for now because it doesn’t really have any bearing on this story.

² The second-hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is finding a reliable source for the rates. I used an archived copy of a guru site about Wolverhampton history.

³ Even relatively-recently, the argument that income tax might be repealed as incompatible with British values shows up in political debate. Towards the end of the 19th century, Prime Ministers Disraeli and Gladstone could be relied upon to agree with one another on almost nothing, but both men spoke at length about their desire to abolish income tax, even setting out plans to phase it out… before having to cancel those plans when some financial emergency showed up. Turns out it’s hard to get rid of.

⁴ There are, of course, other potential reasons for bricked-up windows – even aesthetic ones – but a bit of a giveaway is if the bricking-up reduces the number of original windows to 6, 9, 14 or 19, which are thesholds at which the savings gained by bricking-up are the greatest.

⁵ You’ve probably heard about how glass remains partially-liquid forever and how this explains why old windows are often thicker at the bottom. You’ve probably also already had it explained to you that this is complete bullshit. I only mention it here to preempt any discussion in the comments.

⁶ This is even more-pronounced in cities like Amsterdam where a width/frontage tax forced buildings to be as tall and narrow and as close to their neighbours as possible, further limiting opportunities for access to natural light.

⁷ Yet I’m willing to learn a surprising amount about Dutch tax law of the 19th century. Go figure.

⁸ Obligatory Pet Shop Boys video link. Can that be a thing please?

⁹ But definitely not 17th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please. That shit was bonkers.

Dan Q found GC89T04 Japanse glazen dobbers

This checkin to GC89T04 Japanse glazen dobbers reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

An easy find. Didn’t take nor leave any books, but briefly skimmed the Borland JBuilder 2 Getting Started guide, because it was familiar/nostalgic. Pretty sure I used this tool… about 25 years ago!

Dan Q found GC8R0FY SIX on the beach

This checkin to GC8R0FY SIX on the beach reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

An easy find. As a approached I thought that a couple cuddling here might be in my way, but they were just getting ready to leave as I arrived! SL (love the long thin logbook!), TFTC. Now to make my way back to the station!

Dan Q found GC79PX6 Galgenveld / Field of Gallows

This checkin to GC79PX6 Galgenveld / Field of Gallows reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Eww. Had to put my hand into two gross holes before finding the (correct) third gross hole I needed to put my hand into. Worth it in the end for a happy smiley face. Thanks for bringing me to this place and teaching me its history. TFTC!

Dan Q found GCAJGEA Welcome to Amsterdam! (Virtual Reward 4.0)

This checkin to GCAJGEA Welcome to Amsterdam! (Virtual Reward 4.0) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

TFTC! I’m not carrying any tickets for UK transport, but I’ve got a (mildly defaced) British banknote and I found a tram (the number 13, which connected me to my hotel this week) and a ferry (which I then went and caught to go find some more caches!).