SSJPython

Why is something so essential, so basic, like the weather forecast being privatized? Why is everything becoming so shit?

I think that is part of the reason. Japanese zoning is very liberal and loose compared to the US.

There's just something about Japan that makes its simplicity so beautiful. Yes, we all know Japan has dealt with economic problems, lost decades, declining fertility, etc.

But they still manage to keep the beautiful simplicity of life that makes their culture one of the world's richest.

There's an excellent book by economist Michael Hudson called "America's Protectionist Takeoff" that discusses how the US used tariffs to promote certain industries in order to compete on the world stage. It was part of Alexander Hamilton's American System. Friedrich List, the German economist that wrote "The National System of Political Economy", used the American System to advocate for the same policies in Germany. Germany eventually adopted these policies and became an economic powerhouse themselves. Likewise, Meiji Japan went so far as to adopt the ideas of Friedrich List's economic policies, which resulted in them becoming a great power in a generation.

Tariffs can work, but only if they are targeted towards certain industries/sectors. They can't just be slapped across the board and be expected to work properly. Furthermore, they must be attached to certain KPIs such as exports (i.e., the ability to effectively compete on the international market). Joe Studwell's "How Asia Works" argues that Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all used tariffs and subsidies to promote their own "national champions". In turn, they forced those companies export their products rather than just sell domestically in order to compete. If they didn't meet those export targets, those companies were cut off from state support. Ha Joon Chang, a Korean developmental economist, likens this to raising a child: you spend their initial formative years supporting them until they are able to support themselves without your help.

Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?

Christ Himself rejected various temptations by Satan when he was in the wilderness.

I should've said the worship of the temporal (material reality, etc.) rather than the spiritual.

As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”

Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.

Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.

No offense, but you have to be an idiot to not even consider the possibility that your data was going to be sold. What do they think they were going to do with the data? Just keep it safe in storage?

Car payments have skyrocketed since the pandemic due to the massive increase in prices and the increase in interest rates.

The only people that do this are ones that have no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.

Can someone tell me what the point of RTO is? These companies made insane profits during the pandemic and when everyone was WFH. Why rock the boat? Is it just corporate real estate prices? Is that all it comes down to?

What does that have to do with civil vs. common law? There isn't anything inherent in rule of law based on cases and precedent that should restrict infrastructure projects.

I am not talking about those with the lowest incomes. I am talking about a universal approach similar to most other OECD countries.

Why doesn't California actually do something productive with all its economic power? It now has the fourth largest economy in the world in terms of GDP. Why not experiment a little bit by providing public healthcare to California citizens free at the point of delivery/service? Or constructing high-speed rail to connect SoCal to the Bay Area?

implying that any tech conferences under the Assads didn't count.

Why shouldn't it count exactly?

On the one hand, capitalists and business owners want people to have more children in order to keep the economy functioning. On the other hand, they want to make work as inconvenient as possible and want work to encompass the life of the employee.

It's becoming increasingly clear that there is a trade-off and an inverse relationship between career growth and family formation.

To get a detailed lay of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote-sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging). Drones are tightly regulated in Uzbekistan, but the researchers managed to get the necessary permits to fly one at the site. A lidar scanner uses laser pulses to map the features of land below. The technology has been increasingly used in archaeology—in the past few years it has helped uncover a lost Maya city sprawling beneath the rainforest canopy in Guatemala.

This method has its limitations, Silvia says—namely, it often turns up false positives. It’s also impossible to confirm which features come from which time period without more excavation.

Despite the limitations, it's still great that this technology is making inroads in archaeology. Would be interested to see this put to work in the Sahara and other mostly unexplored/unexcavated areas. Seems to be a low-cost but potentially high-reward project.

There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way.

If we really want reform, the system should be changed from a first-past-the-post presidential system to a parliamentary system with party-list proportional representation. Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society.

Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.

The Japanese Fifth Generation project was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry coordinated by the Japanese Government

In a sense, Japan's ability to stay the course in pursuit of a long-term payoff-- usually considered one of the country's strongest assets-- turned into a liability.

Japan is an expert at public-private partnerships. Their entire economic development story was based on the government and private enterprises working together. They didn't take an ideological approach to development. They ignored both the neoliberal route and the socialist route.

This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions).

This sounds very similar to the common law vs. civil law traditions as well. I wonder if there's a connection between linguistics and legal systems.

How exactly can you "remove" the profit motive without outright taking control of private educational institutions?

If you want public education to become more affordable, then standards must be raised and it must become more scarce.

Higher education has become too powerful and influential due to unlimited government loan guarantees. They used that to charge insane amounts and hired bloated administrations.

Get the government out of the student loan business and take a lesson from the Germans: promote vocational and technical schooling. Not everyone needs to go to university or get a university education.

They don't want to end homelessness because then so many activists and organizations will be out of a job. It's a perverse incentive.

The key to tackling the housing crisis is to build more housing, particularly high-density housing. And to do that, zoning laws must be deregulated and liberalized, if not outright abolished in some instances.

But of course, the activists will never agree to that because it's a market-centered reform and because they are rich NIMBYs. More housing will mean the properties they own will decrease in value. The scarce housing supply and the continued existence of the homelessness problem is great for their own wallet.

This might be a naive question but what's to stop a company from telling a city or municipality that they meet the percentage? Not like there's any way the city can verify.

Yes, I didn't think I needed to add a disclaimer on Hacker News that explanation != justification, but alas.

I don't think this is true for every single country in the world, especially those more concerned with their own well-being above their "global security status". That's the kind of black and white view that leads to more division and separation rather than humans trying to work together.

For some countries, maximizing their security simply means trying to survive and not get taken over. These are typically smaller countries such as Armenia. They can't afford to focus on their economic well-being or working with other nations if their existence is threatened. For other countries that are established powers, maximizing security can mean anything from securing the territory it currently holds (India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Korea) to expanding its territory (Russia, Azerbaijan) to getting or maintaining a sphere of influence (US, Russia, China).

Yes, it's pretty much identical to Russia-Ukraine. And I'm not justifying it, I am just explaining how the US sees it.

There is no morality in geopolitics. In the anarchic international system, there is no global enforcement mechanism, so states will always try to maximize their security at the expense of others. In short, might makes right in this system.

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." - Thucydides

I think the US was very concerned at the time that Chile under Allende would become a client state or a vassal of the Soviet Union similar to Cuba. The US still upholds the Monroe Doctrine which states that any intervention in the politics of the New World by foreign powers is a threat to the US. The US does not want any foreign interference or potential military bases in its 'backyard'.

I understand that companies need some sort of SAT/ACT-like method to rank candidates. I completely understand that part since there aren't really licenses in software engineering like other engineering fields. But I feel like a better way would be to present candidates with questions and problems actually related to the job. For example, if the job requires an understanding of Pandas, perhaps giving candidates actual tasks in Pandas would be better than asking them to traverse a binary tree.

Why can't the US treat education seriously the way East Asian countries do? Or hell, even the way Germany does with its emphasis on vocational schooling as an alternative to university?

Feels like the US picked the worst of both these systems.