Chevalier

Not to argue with personal taste, but I think most of these problems are just becoming accustomed to a different UI. Vivaldi is easily the most customizable browser on the market, and it's not even close. I don't work for Vivaldi and I'm not getting paid by them, just a fervent acolyte.

1) I'm not sure I understand. You don't like how small the icons are, so you made them larger, but then you don't like they're larger? Like you, I also like nice big hitboxes, and I haven't noticed any issues. If you're just trying to scale the webpage zoom, look at the bottom right corner of the status bar -- there's a zoom bar you can drag.

2) Try the Human theme, which changes colors to complement whatever webpage you're looking at. I absolutely love it. I use vertical tabs, which aren't cluttered; maybe the horizontal tabs are? If you don't like square tabs, you can round the corners to squircles in the settings.

3) The command panel works flawlessly for me to search current open tabs, bookmarks, etc. Maybe it's just a different implementation than Firefox?

4) The trash icon at the bottom of the vertical tabs isn't to close all tabs -- if you want to do that, just right-click any tab and select "close all tabs below." The trash icon is a SUPER useful recovery tool that stores your browsing history, essentially. If you accidentally close a tab or a window, you can just restore it by clicking the trash icon and selecting the closed tab/window in reverse chronological order.

Vivaldi today is what Firefox was twenty years ago -- just outstripping all competition and being an absolute joy for the end user. You can customize Vivaldi to be whatever you want it to be, and I think you'd really enjoy it as your default browser.

Ctrl+F "Vivaldi" -- no relevant comments? Vivaldi is impossibly excellent. How is Arc getting so much more attention?

Want vertical tabs? Vivaldi. Side bar? Vivaldi. Workspaces? Vivaldi. Mouse gestures? Vivaldi. Vertical space? Vivaldi. Customizable speed dial? Vivaldi. Keyboard commands? Popout mini-browser? Encrypted sync? Page tiling? Chrome extensions? Multiple types of tab groups? Excellent tools for inspection, screenshotting, etc.? Total anonymity? Everything comes up Vivaldi.

And what's more, Vivaldi actually works for the USER. They spoof their ID (due to Google sabotage) that lets us use Bing Chat without switching to Chrome. They don't even ask for your email address, unlike Arc. They'll GIVE you an email system for free. Vivaldi's openly committed to rejecting Google's Manifest v3 that cripples user control over what information is collected by Google and what extensions a user can use in their own browser.

And yet Vivaldi receives virtually no attention or praise. And Arc has been showered with it for years, despite never shipping a product until today. It's... very strange. This browser is everything I could ever dream of, and it doesn't get a fraction of the attention that Firefox, Brave, or Chrome gets.

Link for Vivaldi, from the same people behind the original Opera: https://vivaldi.com

First, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. There's a VERY strong censorious zeitgeist sweeping the country, and we liberals seem to have no defense against attacks from our left. The unpersoning and deplatforming mob hysterics, often in the name of race essentialism or systemic oppression, are terrifying for any student of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the rise of Soviet thought policing.

If liberalism means anything, it's the ability of the individual to speak truth even when the mob or the government demands that they remain silent. Substack is one of the only platforms available that hasn't bent the knee to the hysterical mob, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for your spine.

Regarding the app, it's very welcome. I've been using the Safari bookmark in the meantime, and the app is FAR better -- the ability to interact more smoothly, save position, etc. A couple issues:

1) Unarchiving? I experimented with archiving an article. While I'm able to find it in the archived section, I don't see any option to unarchive it.

2) Themes? My theme is set to dark, which is great, but I also enjoy sepia in daylight. I don't see any option to change the color scheme.

3) Podcasts? Podcasts in Substack sound like a great idea, but I've had nothing but problems trying to add certain podcasts (e.g. Late Republic Nonsense) to my PocketCasts app. The only way seems to be having Substack email me a personalized podcast subscription URL rather than an open feed I can just search for in PocketCasts. Partnering with Callin might be an interesting idea, since they seem to have adopted the "Substack but for podcasts" model -- often even recruiting Substack talent.

4) Discovery? I'm really glad to see a discovery tab, and I'd love to see suggestions ("if you like Glenn Greenwald, you might also like...").

5) Pricing? Substack has a great model of direct payments, with writers I want to read, but it gets steep very quickly. Rather than dropping $100/year each for five different writers I want to follow, could you explore bundling? Superstars like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi will probably want to remain independent, but there are lots of smaller names who might benefit from exposure through bundling several smaller newsletters under a single price; or simply from more flexible pricing entirely. I don't think I've seen a single newsletter that offers an annual subscription for under $50-60.

I have a subscription to Apple News almost exclusively for the WSJ, but they also have a lot of other inferior magazines -- The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc. As dramatically as they've fallen in quality, it's still a compelling bundle for $10/month, with my payments allocated across publications based on the articles I read. Have you considered a similar bundle, or allowing writers to form their own bundles?

6) Saving articles? I can save articles to a bookmark and store them in a bookmark folder, which works fine, but it would be convenient to save my favorite articles in Substack that allows me to revisit them.

7) Improving comments? The comments section isn't bad, but they could also become crucial draws. Reddit and HN are draws generally for the quality of their comment sections. Substack currently has an unusually excellent audience -- generally intelligent people interested in deep dives into controversial subjects in order to find the truth. There must be some way to liberalize and interweave comment sections in order to draw on audience expertise and perspective.

That sounds brilliant, but I have no idea how to do any of it. (I have a legal background, not a technical one.) Are there any plug-and-play tools that will do it for me?

Hi all, the very cool interactive racial dot map from the 2010 census is being taken offline on December 31. I think it's really fascinating to browse, and unfortunately they won't be updating it with the 2020 census data. Is there a way I can save the current interactive map (nationwide) so I can browse it after they take it down?

Website address: http://racialdotmap.demographics.coopercenter.org

Statements from UVA:

This map, which uses 2010 Census data, no longer accurately reflects the racial/ethnic composition and distribution of the U.S. population and will be taken off our site on Dec. 31, 2021. The 2020 census data, released on Aug. 12, 2021, provides a new snapshot of the country, and we strongly encourage the use of the most recent data. We hope to produce a new racial dot map based on 2020 data, but doing so is contingent on our ability to secure adequate funding. Learn more about the impact of the racial dot map.

We thank those of you who helped support us in our efforts to secure funding by sharing your racial dot map testimonials. However, we did not acquire the necessary funding and will not be producing a new map based on the 2020 census. In addition, we will be removing the 2010 racial dot map at the end of this year (2021) as it no longer provides the most accurate depiction of the nation’s population distribution and changing racial composition.

If anything, Vivaldi seems faster for me than Chrome was. I haven't seen any of the performance slowdowns that other people on this thread have mentioned. Possibly because I haven't enabled the Mail/Calendar/Feeds full-fat option?

Vivaldi is easily the best browser I've ever used, bar none. But for lacking two-factor authentication on the account itself, I have no complaints - the vertical tabs, web panels, bookmark tree, and the Human theme are unrivaled by any other browser.

I didn't discover Vivaldi until recently, but I'm a fanatical convert now. Strongly recommended.

...no, they don't. Or at least not in the way that this article suggests.

First, we should divide "dating" into two markets -- one for sex and one for long-term relationships.

In my experience, existing dating apps overwhelmingly cater to the sex market. Even the ones supposedly designed to set up professionals are used by both genders to find quality people for quick flings. There IS massive "inequality" in the sex market -- women overwhelmingly judge men by a Pareto distribution, as evidenced by multiple studies (that I can cite upon request) -- but the fact that the average woman is uninterested in the average man doesn't stir within me a call for equitable distribution of sex partners.

Then there's the long-term relationship market, which I admittedly don't know has been successfully addressed by any app. OKCupid's premise was that it would set up compatible people for long-term relationships, but I think OKC is out of vogue now. This is the void that apps like The League are trying to fill, I guess, though I'm baffled as to their appeal.

For women (or either gender that wants to secure long-term commitment from a high-status, high-income mate), The League sort of makes sense. When you're done with your Tinder carousel and want to move on to a relationship, here's a pool of wealthy, connected men whose bank accounts suit your lifestyle aspirations. That's not a pitch that will inspire lust, but at least it's more palatable than admitting to being a sugar baby.

For men, though... why would you want The League? Even if you're an unattractive guy, making what amounts to a Tinder profile for your bank account is just a terrible idea. If you're attractive enough, you can just have sex via Tinder. If you want to pay for sex, there are existing options. If you want someone to love... apps that brag "half of its active members earn more than $500,000" and its kin are frankly not going to provide that.

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This article conflates two important ideas without really addressing either. There IS a very real, accelerating trend of what's called "assortive mating," where highly intelligent people move out of Nowhere, Kentucky to major cities where they meet spouses in line with their intelligence and success. These successful couples have more successful children, who then mate with other successful children, and so on. The less successful people are left behind, mate with other less successful people, and have less successful children who mate with other left behind children. This brain drain is both international and intranational.

Then you have the question of mating strategies, particularly the (traditionally female) interest in securing long-term commitment. The recent book "Date-onomics" did a decent job describing the massive demographic challenge facing educated women in this market -- educated women overwhelmingly desire more successful men, but men generally don't care about their mates' education or status. In fact, as men prefer to date younger women, aging women face the twin challenges of narrowing interest and increasing competition (due to population growth or cultural differentials like age gaps). The League and its kind deserve some respect for nakedly addressing these mating strategies -- men offer up their status and wealth, and women presumably only need to be young and attractive.

Dating apps probably DO accelerate assortive mating. Women are particularly sensitive toward status in men, especially educational attainment. (At least in the long-term relationship market, not necessarily in the sex market.) So ideas like The League and its competitors aren't necessarily a bad idea -- if you can market it as "OKCupid for successful people" rather than "Saudi prince seeking Instagram model." As far as I can tell though, anyone mature enough to want a long-term relationship is not in the douchey Vegas-ish market that The League is targeting. Anyone tasteless enough to want The League is probably more interested in its clique than its offerings. And that leaves wide open the potential market of "successful professionals who desire other successful professionals for long-term commitment without having to sort through the proletariat."

Orrr among people who wear vision correction, the US population has a higher median income that can afford contact lenses.

Without condemning anyone, the US has a very stratified class system. Those lower on the socio-economic ladder may not invest in vision care, which is a more complicated and expensive proposition in the US than it is in Europe. Among those that do, the US population probably has more disposable income than their European counterparts.

I love Europe, but saying that Americans hate nerds and Europeans are intellectual is just lazy. Many European policies, especially in terms of monetary policy and immigration policy, are not what I would call thoughtful or logical.

Anne Frank was a refugee, ergo all refugees are Anne Frank. Cultural values and religious duties do not in any way influence the risk undertaken by a host country. ISIS in no way reflects a quite textual interpretation of Islam, and any assertion of European cultural superiority to virtually any part of MENA is to assert racial supremacy of Europeans.

I support a strong immigration program, including refugees. However, immigration should be limited to compatible cultures and high-reward immigrants. Can we institute an incredibly basic filter to exclude cultures that boast popular support of the murder of homosexuals? (Or apostates, or heretics, or blasphemers, or...)

Oh for christ's sake. I am a major proponent of public transit and walkable cities. Anyone who shares my support should be cheering wildly at Uber's expansion. Uber is the greatest, and perhaps the only, threat that we've ever had to American car ownership.

With Uber, those occasional necessary car trips can be contracted out cheaply and easily. When you aren't FORCED to own a car to survive, many people simply won't buy one. The fewer people that own cars, the more heavily transit and bicycles will be used for daily trips. Ride-sharing is perhaps the most important blow ever struck against American car dependency.

I'm tempted to sneer at iPods too, but it's actually a pretty good choice for the gym. If you're worried about your $800 iPhone getting crushed, an iPod touch will record your lifts just as well; or an iPod Shuffle will clip on to your shirt for a long run through a bad neighborhood.

Also for kids where parents don't want to buy expensive contracts. Or even frugal adults who can just make all their calls through Hangouts/Skype and don't need a cell plan.

...so we've gone from debating which word we should use to describe conservative reactionaries to the denial that they even exist.

I'm honestly kind of impressed.

Put mildly, you are mistaken about Mexico. From ECLAC [1]:

It should not be surprising that today more than half of its population is poor (CONEVAL, 2014), a proportion similar to the one prevailing three decades ago. Thus, more than 55 millions of Mexicans live in conditions of poverty.

In these years, What happened to inequality? Well for anyone that visits Mexico, the words of Alexander Von Humbold (1811), more than two hundred years ago, still ring true:

“Mexico is the country of inequality. Nowhere does there exist such a fearful difference in the distribution of fortune, civilization, cultivation of the soil, and population. …The capital and several other cities have scientific establishments, which will bear a comparison with those of Europe. The architecture of the public and private edifices, the elegance of the furniture, the equipages, the luxury and dress of the women, the tone of society, all announce a refinement to which the nakedness, ignorance, and vulgarity of the lower people form the most striking contrast.”

As the writer Augusto Monterroso wrote in 2002 (p.60): “the unique, truly hyper-real characteristic of Mexico is its social inequality; the misery that marks the everyday life of the immense majority of Mexicans.”

The figures corroborate this image. As Table 1 shows there is an almost 27-fold difference between the average incomes of the top and the bottom deciles. This difference is in stark contrast with the average ratio of 10 to 1 in the OECD (OECD 2014). More worrying, the top 1% of Mexico’s distribution has an average annual income 47 times that of the poorest 10% (del Castillo Negrete Rovira 2012). It is very likely that, were there numbers for smaller slices at the top, the ratios would be astronomical.

Likewise, I admire your optimism that Chinese inequality will be solved just as soon as the newly rich realize that they're Communists. I hope the future will prove you right.

Neither a race war nor a class war will happen in the US. Seriously? Even ignoring your optimistic assumptions of organized minorities (speaking as one, there are shockingly few war pacts among us), how exactly would such a revolution be organized, funded, armed, or fed? How would they conduct communications?

More to the point, what possible ideology would unite these revolutionaries? The Arab Spring had fundamentalist Islam as a unifying identity, but the US is nowhere near as sympathetic to fundamentalism... and even if it were, Christianity has proven far less conducive to the sort of grassroots-organized violence you see in MENA or South Asia. At worst (best?), you'll see the sort of anarchic lawlessness you see today in Detroit or Flint.

I'm not being sarcastic when I say I admire your idea of revolution. Many in the Arab Spring shared the same ideals, and were in for a rude awakening when their revolutions were instead dominated by religious fundamentalism and racial/cultural feuds. But the US lacks the strong cultural/religious ideologies necessary to organize armies and instigate revolutions -- which is a damn good thing, but it also limits possible plebeian uprising. Which is also a very good thing.

[1] http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/...

"Falling" is a very relative term. Rather than look at birth rate, look at total population growth on this chart: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Certainly the rate of increase has slowed -- which is an accomplishment, relative some other countries' quadrupling of population since 1950. But Egypt has still gone from a desert country of 28m in 1960 that relies on the extortion of diminishing water supplies from Ethiopia to... a desert country of 82m in 2012. The Arab Spring was directly related to the higher price of heavily subsidized bread in North Africa due to a minor spike in corn prices that year.

Even if the birth rate fell flat today (and as you noted, the opposite is happening), can you honestly predict any future for Egypt other than Malthusian failure? The Aswan dam was specifically built in a rare fit of foresight of this exact future... and relies heavily on Ethiopian/Sudanese submission to Egyptian riparian rights. I think it's fair to say that Egypt is extremely overwhelmed by its population growth.

I'm not sure that "redneck" qualifies as a racial slur, nor that we should never have words that describe different cultural groups.

But fair enough. What term would you prefer we use for generally uneducated, reactionary populations that infamously believe their personal arsenals will be used to overthrow a tyrannous federal government and establish socially conservative concepts of personal liberty?

This belief in revolution certainly isn't limited to conservative reactionaries (and I mocked leftists in the next sentence), but I'm not sure it's that productive to start a tangent of personal offense rather than address the questionable idea of armed revolution.

And yet the extremely wealthy do face an abiding risk from festering inequity: The have-nots might finally lose patience and turn upon the haves. “That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.”

Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works.

The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class.

Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth.

The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe.

So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures.

I'm a bit surprised you don't recognize the reference. I'm not big on gaming, but even I know the term is used by PC players to elevate themselves above the Xbox/Playstation console flamewars.

But yes, I'm not a Nazi and I don't support the idea of master races (aside from ebooks and PC gaming).

I, too, am a member of the ebook master race. As a passionate and frequent reader, I'm awed by the revolution in portability, quality, availability provided by ebooks.

...but I can also afford them. When I was a kid, I spent every day in the local bookstore sitting on the floor, reading everything I could get my hands on. (Ironically, this was only possible at the larger bookstores and chains; the smaller indie types for which everyone waxes nostalgic would never allow it, though I hardly blame them.) My mom shares my love of literature, and bought every book I ever requested, but she could never have afforded a tenth of the in-store books I devoured.

Starbucks and ebooks are huge improvements from paper warehouses, but I wonder what would happen if I were born today and paper book stores vanished from the world. Libraries don't necessarily fill the same niche, in terms of the quality of both the branches and their clientele. The public library where I grew up was in a dangerous area, filled with junkies and surrounded by gangsters, and I just wouldn't have had the same opportunities to read unmolested as I did at bookstores.

Though now that I'm re-investigating public libraries, I've been nothing but impressed by their quality. Outside of rough neighborhoods and the constant threat of closure, public libraries may be the best possible opportunities for modern kids.

We ended up with a name very similar to the one we started with, one that all of us like just fine, and one which is just going to be what people call our new, supremely free, project management app. I think everyone would have gotten used to Hippolist too, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s called Trello now.

In the end we should have just had Michael do the whole name picking in thirty minutes and been done with it.

I mean... successful names DO imply what the product is. "Google" is similar to the English language term for staring in wonder. "Facebook" is taken from the existing name for books of college students. "MyFitnessPal," clunky as the name and product are, is a pretty informative name. If you rattled off a list of these names to a grandmother, chances are that she could divine the purpose of each website.

I'm a huge fan of Trello, and I think the name works well the same way that "Xerox" worked well -- because most people really don't have another word for kanban systems or photocopies, and the product name suddenly defines the category. But unless you're churning out revolutionary new products rather than refining existing ideas, I think it makes sense for your name to in some way characterize your product.

Since the original thread on this vanished, questions (and applause) for any Googlers reading this:

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EXCELLENT. Two questions:

1) If I've stored photos as 2000px on G+, will they automatically upgrade to full size if I upload my full-size photo library to GDrive?

2) Likewise, will auto-awesome creations from previous low-quality pictures be upgraded to higher resolution versions?

I believe that page is outdated as of today. Until now, G+ stored pictures up to 2000px for free. As of today, photos of up to 16 megapixels may be stored for free.

EXCELLENT. Two questions:

1) If I've stored photos as 2000px on G+, will they automatically upgrade to full size if I upload my full-size photo library to GDrive?

2) Likewise, will auto-awesome creations from previous low-quality pictures be upgraded to higher resolution versions?

Exactly. The US has virtually no surviving "urban" cities, where one can comfortably walk and bike wherever they need to go. (Much less enjoy the population density to support local coffee shops, niche stores, etc.) We have New York, Boston, DC (sorta)... Philadelphia? Maybe Chicago?

Even San Francisco can barely be called urban. It's absolutely dominated by automobile traffic, especially outside the tiny downtown core. I've never seen such fast-moving traffic on such wide streets in a city ostensibly hailed as walkable. Typical SF buildings are 2-3 stories at most, nearly all have attached garages or parking, and transit is hilariously awful.

Much less Silicon Valley. It's... suburbia. Try to walk from Google's HQ to Apple's. Try to walk anywhere, really, outside of a narrow strip near Stanford. What exactly does the OP feel is urban about Silicon Valley's car-dependent zoning?

And the weirdest thing is when you wonder who the hell was protesting the approvals. NOBODY thinks a KFC is superior to a modern apartment building. (And even if one did, you could just allocate the first floor of all buildings to commercial leases and let KFC move in where it wants.)

As far as I can tell, the only obstacle to new construction are existing property owners who fear that the appreciation of their old property's value will diminish as supply finally expands to meet demand. While they're probably right in the very short run, I'm pretty sure that turning SF into Copenhagen -- that is, 5-7 floor buildings, narrow streets dedicated to pedestrians and bikes, mixed usage between residential and commercial purposes, etc. -- would DRAMATICALLY improve long-term property values.

So who the hell is fighting to keep SF car-dependent, dirty, old, and sprawling? I just can't understand the resistance to new construction.

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Edit: To answer my own question, aside from property owners, we know that car owners are ferociously defensive of parking minimums and low density. The idea is to ensure constant free parking anywhere they go and to discourage traffic they think slows them down.

Trying not to sound as contemptuous as I feel, such people are making very basic errors in logic when they believe pedestrians add to, rather than subtract from, automobile congestion. Also, literally this entire country has been razed to accommodate automobile interests with the partial exception of the urban cores of New York and San Francisco. One would think that if driving were so important, such people might decide to live in an existing sprawling strip mall rather than insist on turning SF into one.

"The new digital credentials can solve this problem by providing exponentially more information. Think about all the work you did in college. Unless you’re a recent college graduate, how much of it was saved and archived in a way that you can access now? What about the skills you acquired in various jobs? Digital learning environments can save and organize almost everything. Here, in the “unlabeled” folder, are all of my notes, tests, homework, syllabus and grades from the edX genetics course. My “real” college courses, by contrast, are lost to history, with only an inscrutable abbreviation on a paper transcript suggesting that they ever happened at all."

Exactly. On the merits, a MOOC degree ought to be infinitely more worthwhile than any traditional college degree. MOOC completion (quite literally) demonstrates project work, practical skills, attendance, and interaction. The courses themselves are the highest quality in the world and the rigor and impartiality is available for all the world to see. In a sane world, MOOCs will inherit global education.

But the world hasn't caught up yet. Right now the only commonly understood credential is the college degree, which everyone knows can be accomplished through registering for bullshit courses, skipping class, plagiarizing occasional essays nobody will ever read, and earning a one-word major that does nothing to prove any actual skills. Historically, this is as good as we've been able to do. No longer.

Give it time. There are entrenched interests here -- not only the massive and powerful education industry, which is now obsolete, but also every existing college graduate whose expensive credentials are now threatened by the radically superior MOOC certificate. Not to pick on teacher unions in particular, but several states require infamously pointless masters degrees in education before you can teach. Lawyers likewise REALLY don't need a three-year JD before we can practice... and the US stands alone in requiring bachelor's degrees prior to legal training or bar passage (with the exception of California). Virtually any non-STEM job that requires a bachelor's can be filled without the aid of expensive four-year certificates in poetry or pottery or communications. That's an enormous threat to basically every working professional in the United States.

Employ the D.E.N.N.I.S. system here.

First, demonstrate the value of MOOC certificates to employers.

Second, engage employers with hiring pipelines direct from Coursera/Udacity/edX.

Third, nurture these pipelines and grow them into a viable Github-for-employment.

Fourth, neglect protests from existing interests that have demanded advanced degrees in "teaching MOOCs" (seriously) or jeers that MOOC completion rates are low.

Fifth, inspire students with visible examples of success through MOOCs. Thiel fellows are the closest to this, but the project more closely resembles a lottery than a structured path.

Sixth, separate MOOCs entirely from their current aping of traditional courses. There is no reason whatsoever to release courses on a real-time basis, or to rely on artisanal videotaped lectures. (Though MOOCs have admittedly improved dramatically on the latter, with faster speeds, transcripts, open courseware, etc.)

Or... just withdraw federal subsidies for student loans and make host institutions partially liable for student defaults. I'd love to see the argument to pay $50k/year to attend no-name for-profit ripoffs in the middle of nowhere, versus free attendance in every Harvard course at any Starbucks in New York City.

Scbrg beat me to it, but Denmark is still twice as safe as the US when you consider kilometers driven. Keep in mind that this means cars-vs-cars.

And more to the point, take a second to think about what you just said. Denmark is nearly four times as safe as the US because they gave people lovely cities like Copenhagen where kids can safely bike to school and adults can walk to work or to a local restaurant. This means...

...yup, that they don't risk their lives every day in cars and thus the per-vehicle-kilometer rate isn't terribly useful in assessing a walkable lifestyle. The kids that bike to school in Copenhagen don't die in automobile wrecks and aren't exposed to risk on a per-vehicle-kilometer rate. Those dangers are for American kids.

Even when you disregard the safety/quality of daily life for urban Danes and use the car-vs-car per capita per-vehicle-kilometer rate, it's astonishing that Denmark's excellent urban planning has even influenced Danish drivers, in that it's more than twice as safe to drive in Denmark as it is to drive in the US. Contrary to your last statement, Denmark is RADICALLY safer because they drive less. Even drivers are safer because of the superior design of Danish cities and streets.

Downtowns are dying because parasitic exurbs have both removed tax revenue from the urban core while multiplying their infrastructure/services/health costs. It's unsurprising that residents flee cities that become dangerous, dirty highways.

Some of these cities are now beyond repair, not least for the overarching national trend of capital concentration in Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley, but these reforms would still help enormously. For example, Bloomberg's plan to toll bridges into New York City that was vetoed by car-dependent Albany. It's absolutely ridiculous that exurban commuters are allowed to devastate NYC every day, for free, because they're too entitled either to live in the city or even to commute via less destructive trains.

I would really love to hear your explanation why New York City should be required to spend billions on bridges and roads crushed by automobile traffic for commuters who don't even pay taxes into the repair fund. Much less why NYC residents should be forced to give up enormous swaths of precious road real estate at peril to their health and quality of life.

Just to clarify, are you implying here that elderly, infirm, or underage people benefit from car dependence?

Because...

Of course there's a place for suburbs, and I'm not opposed to the idea of less dense housing. Such housing can exist in the context of walkable neighborhoods with public transit, though. I think there's quite a bit of merit to firm city limits that prevent sprawl and car dependence.

That said... if someone wants to live in exurbia, he should pay an appropriate amount to access amenities downtown. It's absurd that someone can pay $1500/month for a studio downtown, but only a few feet from his front door, anyone can drive a similarly-sized vehicle at hazardous speeds for free.

Driving is essentially free in the US, despite enormous costs in terms of infrastructure and public space. That needs to change. If car-dependent exurbs must continue to exist, then we should at least make those exurbs responsible for their own costs rather than forcing urban residents to have their neighborhoods destroyed and then pay for the privilege.